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.

Abandonment of the Sidewalk Labs project proposed for Toronto is unfortunate, but it serves as an important lesson that building a smart city from the top down is hard.

Like humans, living walls might be overdue for a trim, but few are imperilled in the now largely empty surroundings of commercial and institutional buildings.

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.

While climate change may have slipped somewhat from people’s consciousness and priorities right now, it’s noteworthy that the pandemic and climate crises are both problems of exponential growth against a limited capacity to cope.

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.

Technically, three real estate entities are ranked in the 2020 Clean200 list of publicly traded companies, but just two of them have conventional commercial real estate portfolios.

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to voluntarily share energy and water consumption data, but a looming deadline for mandatory disclosure has been withdrawn.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.

Guidance related to natural ventilation, particulate filtration and compartmentalization of multi-residential HVAC systems are prominent in the list of identified "significant changes" compared to the incumbent 2016 version of the standards.

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.

A widening scope of resources can be tapped to build increasingly sophisticated risk profiles, but sustainability practitioners note that data is often fragmented and difficult to obtain.

The mounting consequences of being stuck fast in the wrong place for an extended wrong time begin with soaring insurance premiums and end with stranded assets.

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.

Major Canadian players figure among both GRESB investor members with full access to the data and the larger complement of management members that report and are benchmarked through the real estate assessment.