Energy Efficiency: A New Construct

Despite the ready availability of energy-efficiency technologies which would significantly reduce businesses’ operating costs, a ground-breaking federal study indicates that they’re under-utilized – if used at all. The National Round Table on the Environment & and the Economy and Sustainable Development Technology Canada  have found that commercial buildings account for no less than 14% of end-use energy consumption. As a result, they are responsible for 13% of Canada’s carbon emissions.

“Technologies are not being taken up, with the result that energy use and carbon emissions continue to grow,” they say in a summary of their 114-page study, Geared for Change. “Climate policy makers need to consider not just long-term national greenhouse gas reduction targets, but specific policies and actions on a sector-by-sector basis to get the deep emission reductions already set by the Government of Canada.”

Success, they say, requires a shift away from national-level policies to a more parochial approach because each sector of the economy has a distinct emissions footprint which necessitates sector-specific solutions.

Hence the collaborative study of commercial buildings. It flows from a 2006 NRTEE report on long-term energy use in Canada in which the think-tank stated that efficiency improvements alone could reduce the commercial sector’s annual carbon emissions by 58% from a 2050 “business as usual” scenario. The following year, an STDC report indicated that commercial buildings’ emissions could be reduced easily and significantly by 2030.

However, the latest research has found a “fragmented and diverse” sector with apparently entrenched resistance to improved efficiency. It also indicates that addressing that resistance will become a greater challenge as Canada moves to a more service-oriented and knowledge-based economy that likely will increase employee densities in the commercial sector.

Its energy consumption grew by 25% between 1990 and 2005, yielding a 27% jump in carbon emissions, and while its energy intensity increased from 1.69 gigajoules per square meter to 1.84 GJ/m2 between 1990 and 2003, it fell to 1.62 GJ/m2 by 2005.

The fundamental complexity of the commercial sector with myriad building designs, ownership and operation, coupled with the involvement of all levels of government, underscores the need for more focuses emissions policies.

“This multi-jurisdictional governing framework makes it difficult in turn for developers and owners to stay abreast of applicable policies and available resources regarding energy efficiency,” the NRTEE and STDC say. “Other barriers to technology adoption . . . . range from issues related to risk management, information gaps, complexities in the commercial building value chain, financial costs related to being the first mover in the market, energy pricing that does not account for environmental externalities, and institutional and regulatory barriers caused by existing policy frameworks.”

“No one measure on its own is sufficient to wring the necessary emission reductions from the sector and achieve our targets,” they say. “The most effective is a . . . carbon price coupled with increasingly stringent regulations – but with the application of focused technology subsidies or incentives.”