Advancing Building Retrofits The Energy Efficient Tower Renewal Implementation Program More than 800,000 apartment suites in Canada are currently in need of retrofits to meet today’s standards for healthy, comfortable, and resilient housing. Yet our retrofit industry remains nascent. What’s getting in the way of progress?
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ccording to a recent Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) research project, the most common barriers limiting deep retrofit uptake in aging residential towers are: • risk avoidance by owners; • absence of regulatory requirements to undertake retrofits; • an unsatisfactory return on investment on many deep energy retrofit measures, especially those tied specifically to greenhouse gas emission reductions; • and expensive retrofit design solutions due to lack of off-the-shelf products. 10 | Canadian Apartment | Part of the REMI Network |
With those barriers in mind, the Energy Efficient Tower Renewal implementation Program aims to provide an overview of the replicable steps available to the industry while promoting cost-effective, Canadian-made solutions in the following three areas: thermal bridging; ventilation systems; and, non-combustible building envelopes. Understanding that advancing the building sector toward deep energy retrofits is a process that requires system-wide movement; therefore, limitation in areas like supportive financing, industry upskilling and regulatory change need to be addressed. The ultimate
goal is to move market acceptance beyond the early adopters (i.e. those who are ideologicallydriven and/or choose to undertake deep retrofits as a result of an organizational mandate) to the industry majority whose participation is influenced by the broader market and regulatory framework. Promoting “made in Canada” products CHMC’s research determined that there may be significant opportunities and a strategic business case for advancing made-inCanada, high-performance retrofit products. It also asserts that the federal government—
