Though too many countries are falling far behind their targets for accelerating energy efficiency improvements, Canada can still pick up the pace by treating building decarbonization as a nation-building project, according to one of the country’s leading efficiency policy advocates.

“The challenge is for the concept of ‘nation-building’ to be based on more than resource megaprojects, and to also include forms of economic development that build from existing community strengths, knowledge, and innovation,” Brendan Haley, senior director of policy strategy at Efficiency Canada, said in an email.

To take a first step in that direction, “the federal government should go back to the original objectives spelled out in the Prime Minister’s mandate letter related to productivity, affordability, careers in the skilled trades, and sovereignty,” he told The Energy Mix. “They would see that saving energy meets all these objectives much faster than megaprojects, involving every region of the country, and using products and services made-in-Canada.”

To make it happen, there wouldn’t even be any need to fit energy efficiency into the project queue at the federal government’s new Major Projects Office, since “energy efficiency doesn’t require significant exemption from environmental assessments and other regulatory safeguards,” he added. A renewed emphasis on efficiency would “complement the existing projects on the table”—improving Canada’s oil and gas trade balance by “capturing more value from every barrel sold,” helping local communities benefit from renewable microgrids, and producing the “large-scale demand signal that manufacturers and other implementers need to make long-term investments” in building retrofits.

‘Globally, We’re Not On Track’

Haley was responding to a series of interview questions based on remarks by Jan Rosenow, energy programme leader at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, who’d previously delivered a keynote address at the National Building Decarbonization Forum in Ottawa in late November. Rosenow pointed to the slow pace of energy efficiency gains since December, 2028, when countries attending the COP28 climate summit in Dubai agreed to a doubling in the pace of energy efficiency improvements by 2030.

“Globally, we are certainly not on track,” Rosenow told The Mix, citing European countries that had set “pretty ambitious goals” for deep energy retrofits but then failed to meet them. “The reality is that we are nowhere near what would be required.” Most of the buildings that will be with us in 2050 have already been built, most of those will need retrofits, and the pace at which the work is being done is a “tiny fraction of what it should be if we wanted to do a lot of the heavy lifting [on energy and emissions reductions] with improving efficiency.”

Rosenow said those results have convinced him the majority of emissions savings in the buildings sector will come from heat pump conversions, as well as district energy systems—a technology that isn’t widely used in Canada, but supplies about 70% of the heating in Denmark, and is prominent as well in some countries in Central and Eastern Europe. “Then the efficiency improvements we can get, that’s brilliant,” he said, but “we haven’t been able to bring it up anywhere near where it would need to be.”

A Call for Flexible Programs

Haley said the right solution depends on building type.

“The apparent conflict between weatherization and electrification is a bit tiresome because it has very little to do with how things work on the ground, or how we should design policy,” he explained. “A good policy should give program implementers and building scientists the ability the make good decisions in their contexts, guided by system-level goals and standards… A bad policy is one that artificially restricts common sense, on-the-ground decisions because of a policy wonk debate.”

He cited the federal Oil to Heat Pump Affordability Program as a measure that focused on one solution, and on buildings with just one heating source, but wasn’t flexible enough to address mould problems or significant air leakage. The new Canada Greener Homes Affordability Program, by contrast, supports both electrification and weatherization and “offers greater flexibility to provide a full spectrum of energy efficiency solutions, and even some non-energy upgrade needs such as mould and asbestos that are barriers to better efficiency and electrification.”

But Rosenow stressed the efficiency and decarbonization gains in heat pumps and district energy.

“You could improve efficiency quite dramatically just by rolling out heat pumps and then coupling that with some weatherization,” he said. “That makes it much more attainable. If it’s a narrowly-defined target that focuses on heat consumed per square metre of a building, then it’s a lot harder to achieve.”

Nordic Countries in the Lead

Rosenow said quite a number of countries “‘have gone quite a long way to pretty much finish the job of decarbonizing their buildings,” with Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark emerging as leaders. “These are countries that are similar in climate to Canada and have managed to go quite far”—partly because of that harsh climate, but also because they’ve been working since the 1970s to avoid expensive oil imports by electrifying their economies.

Canada, by contrast, is an oil exporter. But Haley said provinces that rely heavily on heating oil are seeing similar progress, with heat pump adoption hitting 48% in New Brunswick, 41% in Prince Edward Island, and 31% in Nova Scotia—similar to rates of 42% in Sweden and 40% in Finland, though still far behind Norway at 60%.

“The parallel that really matters is between the large amount of inefficient baseboard electric heating that existed in Norway, which is also the situation in Quebec, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador,” Haley said. “In these provinces, replacing inefficient electric heat with heat pumps frees up significant amounts of electricity and cuts electricity bills.”

Haley added that Canada was one of the countries that signed on to the COP28 pledge to double the pace of annual energy efficiency improvements—and the government will have an opportunity to reaffirm on that pledge June 29-30 when Montreal hosts a global energy efficiency conference organized by the International Energy Agency.

The conference “would be a great time to recommit to this goal and to make energy efficiency a nation-building project,” he said.