A promised $2 billion investment in large-scale building retrofits will be central to the Canadian government’s job creation ambitions. Energy efficiency champions have plenty of ideas of how and where the funds could be best leveraged.

Residential consumption is identified as a primary concern and opportunity for the 2021-24 period, along with a continued emphasis on reducing system-wide peak demand

A temporary adjustment to Ontario’s electricity pricing scheme eliminates cost-saving opportunities that many operators of large commercial buildings were anticipating this summer.

The City of Winnipeg has invited commercial building owners and institutional facility managers to affix their Energy Star Portfolio Manager results on a publicly accessible map.

The timing might have been opportune for uptake of the measure — provided it was adopted into provincial and territorial building codes — because it would have applied broadly in what is currently Canada’s most buoyant commercial real estate sector.

For Class A consumers, cost-saving potential will be diminished even if they successfully curtail demand during the five peak hours since those peaks are expected to be lower than usual.

Despite a steep drop in province-wide energy consumption due to COVID-19 triggered business shutdowns, many building owners/managers expect a more modest flow-through dip in operating costs.

The energy demand load has shifted in sync with much of Ontario’s workforce from commercial to home offices, prompting calls for suspension of time-of-use pricing during the current COVID-19 related upheaval

A wider selection of high-performance windows and doors is expected to hit the market as Canada's National Energy Code continues to push the envelope toward net-zero-energy-ready development.

Owners of smaller commercial and multi-residential buildings in Ontario will still be welcome to voluntarily share energy and water consumption data, but a looming deadline for mandatory disclosure has been withdrawn.

It's still unclear how the process of securing environmental approvals for combined heat and power systems will be streamlined, but the Ontario government's recent pledge has been greeted enthusiastically in the buildings sector.

The move concludes the process begun five months ago when the newly elected United Conservative Party government repealed the carbon tax and eliminated the funding source for the incentives.

Few signatories to the Paris Agreement have specifically listed energy efficiency targets in required national plans for meeting their commitments so Three Percent Club founders see plenty of room to capture untapped emissions reductions.

Ontario draws on the legacy of more than a dozen years of programming, while Energy Efficiency Alberta has had little time to capture public or capital planners' attention.

With the largest share of relatively inexpensive lighting upgrades completed, finding additional energy savings gets more complicated and costly. However, significant paybacks are projected from the increase in upfront program costs.

The current formula for allocating global adjustment costs is generally thought to be locked in for at least another year. Changes in the conservation and demand management regime are unfolding more rapidly.

The 2019 Ontario budget lists the Building Code Conservation Advisory Council among 10 provincial agencies deemed to be unnecessary or imprudent expenditures.