The federal government is inviting proposals for local projects to cluster together and complete at least 100 deep energy retrofits in low-rise community housing, based on the Energiesprong model first pioneered in The Netherlands.
The tender call, the second under Ottawa’s Greener Neighbourhoods Pilot Program, is open to local governments, Indigenous applicants, social and affordable housing providers, housing co-ops, and community groups, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) said in a release last week. Bids close September 14.
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“It’s about making sure we can aggregate,” Toronto-Danforth MP Julie Dabrusin, parliamentary secretary to Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson and Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, told the Retrofit Canada conference in Montreal. “Going one home by one home by one home is really slow. So how can we draw on this Energiesprong model to build up a whole neighbourhood at a time?”
“As we learn how to do it,” she added, “we’ll get better at it.”
The applicants’ guide calls for projects designed to:
• Validate the technical and economic feasibility of the Energiesprong model in different parts of the country;
• Explore “innovative approaches” to deep energy retrofits, defined by NRCan as reducing a building’s energy consumption by at least 50%;
• Build capacity and a business case for approaches to aggregating deep retrofits.
The Energiesprong model “aggregates homes and buildings in an entire neighbourhood into a single retrofit project, thereby reducing project costs along with energy consumption and emissions,” the NRCan release notes. The approach has been adopted in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the United States.
Energiesprong was also the main inspiration for a June, 2021 national retrofit mission report by Efficiency Canada. Authors Brendan Haley and Ralph Torrie mapped out a plan to upgrade every building in the country by 2035, eliminate their fossil fuel consumption by 2050, make energy poverty a thing of the past, and free up 50 terawatt-hours of electricity for other uses—enough to eliminate 60 million tonnes of carbon pollution per year if it were used to power 10 million electric vehicles.
The approach has also drawn its share of skeptics, with at least one analyst pointing to the relatively small number of retrofits that Energiesprong projects anywhere have ever completed.
