The 2022 Canadian Energy Efficiency Scorecard

Webinar on November 18, 2022

James, Alyssa and Brendan, our Scorecard team, will present the results of Efficiency Canada’s 2022 Canadian Energy Efficiency Scorecard.

The Scorecard evaluates provincial policy and performance on energy efficiency over an 18-month period. 2022 Scorecard highlights include:

– New metrics that consider compensation for public interest intervenors, fuel switching policy and programs, and provincial appliance and equipment standards.

– The Yukon being included in the analysis and scoring, for the first time.

Join the team to get an in-depth overview of the results, as well as a discussion of trends, provincial strengths and opportunities, and the role of the federal government moving forward.

Speakers:

Brendan Haley, Director of Policy Research, Efficiency Canada

James Gaede, Research Manager, Efficiency Canada

Alyssa Nippard, Research Associate, Efficiency Canada

 

Facilitator:

James Gaede, Research Manager, Efficiency Canada

Transcript:

James Gaede:

Hello everybody. My name’s James Gaede. I’m research manager at Efficiency Canada. And I’m also project lead on the scorecard project, which is what we’re gonna be talking about today, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

As you might know, Efficiency Canada is a virtual organization. But we are actually based out of Carleton University which is located on the traditional and unceded territories of the Algonquin Nation.

Today we are here to talk about the 2022 Canadian Energy Efficiency Scorecard looking at provinces and territories specifically. Your presenters today will be myself, but also my co-authors of the scorecard. Alyssa Nippard, who is a Research Associate here at Efficiency Canada, and Brendan Haley, who is our Policy Director.

Today we will be going through four parts of the scorecard project. First, Alyssa will start off to give a little bit of background on the purpose and methodology of the scorecard. Then it’ll come to me and I’ll do a quick overview of the high level 2022 results, the national level results for the scorecard. I’ll pass it to Brendan, who will go through the provincial and territorial highlights, and then finally it’ll come back to me and I’ll just remind you all that there is an accompanying policy database available online to the scorecard, which is a helpful resource for doing research and and comparing and contrasting things across the provinces for energy efficiency.

So I will now pass it to Alyssa.

Alyssa Nippard:

All right, so this is the fourth year that we have produced a scorecard. In it we track five key policy areas, which include efficiency programs, enabling policies, buildings, transportation, and industry. The metrics that we track can be categorized into one of three types. So we have policy metrics, which generally capture qualitative data, outcome based metrics, which capture quantitative data, and then there can also be a mix of the two. So all in all, we score each province and territory out of a total of a hundred possible points with a mix of metric types that lean slightly heavier towards the outcomes. So as we’re developing the scorecard each year we have three primary goals.

So the first is to track and report energy efficiency policies and program outcomes, of course. The next is to benchmark and then share best practices of the leading performers. And then lastly, we, we of course wanna promote some friendly competition between the provinces and territories.

 So what you see here is the scorecard development process. So we begin at the start of the year where we discuss what changes we might wanna see whether that be to the scoring or to metrics. We then prepare and distribute information requests to our contacts throughout the provinces and territories.

And then once we receive these completed information requests back, we begin to analyze the information and then start writing the scorecard draft. Lastly what we do is we circulate the draft for peer review, and that just makes sure we correct anything for accuracy. We make any necessary revisions.

And then of course, as we’re doing today, we prepare that scorecard for release and give this type of presentation. Okay, so this is a timeline of what we’re looking at in each scorecard. So the scorecard captures the most recent 12 months of data that is available. So in practice, this means that the period covered occurs somewhere between an 18 month window, beginning in January, 2021.

So we do this for two reasons. One, we need to accommodate program administrators working on fiscal year reporting periods rather than calendar years. And then two, we understand that policy change takes time, of course. So we allow a grace period of about six months into year two for the implementation.

 This year we’re very excited to say that we’ve been able to include Yukon in the full scorecard for the first time. Energy efficiency policy and program tracking in the territories has historically presented a challenge for us. This is due both to resource constraints in the territories themselves and at Efficiency Canada, and also due to a limitation in data.

So we are very excited to have Yukon in the scorecard this year. We continue to work with Northwest Territories and Nunavut, to hopefully one day be able to include them in the full scorecard as well. So this year we’ve included three new metrics. The first metric is one that tracks the involvement of nonprofit and public interest interveners in the utility regulatory process.

The second is a metric that tracks fuel switching policies and programs. And then the third is a new metric that tracks appliance and equipment standards across the country.

So as a result of adding new metrics and reorganizing some others throughout the scorecard, we often see that the points available per metric change per year. So this year there are some minor scoring adjustments that were made, you can see in the table to the right. So as you see, the programming sections increased by two points and the enabling section decreased by one point.

And a little bit further here. Again, building section also increased by two points and the transportation section decreased by three and a quarter points. And there was no change to the industry section. Throughout the scorecard. What we do is we aim for an overall balance across policy areas to reflect energy efficiency potential.

All right, so lastly for my bit here I just wanna remind you that these scores earned by the provinces and territories shouldn’t be necessarily seen as a percentage grade. Instead, what we encourage is think of this as like a perfect score. Reaching that top, peak efficiency as summiting a mountain.

It’s obviously a difficult task. There’s a lot of work ahead of us, but it’s also possible to reach that peak and we see a lot of provinces and territories that are making strides to get there. Alright, that’s it for me. So I’m gonna pass it over to James to share the results.

James Gaede:

Thank you Alyssa. I’m gonna quickly go through some of the top level national results and the overall scoring before we get into the provincial and territorial highlights. As you may know, as part of the scorecard project, we track net incremental energy savings for both electricity and natural gas and also non-regulated fuels in each province, and now the Yukon as well, and we’ve done so for some time. And so we’re able to provide this longer term national overview look at the trends and energy savings. Last year it appeared as if there was a downward trend in net incremental energy savings, which was somewhat concerning. You could see in 2021 we found that there was a pretty good rebound.

A lot of that is due to increased electricity saving in both Ontario and Alberta. But natural gas savings also went up two, which is encouraging. We would like to hope to see these trends continue. Although the nature of the electricity increases in Ontario and Alberta does lead to possibility that they might not be a long term trend upward.

Although recent announcements in Ontario to increase the budget for energy electricity efficiency programs at the ISO might help to make that a kind of enduring trend moving forward. So on the other side, we also track program spending. So this chart is showing you national program spending and energy efficiency program portfolio spending.

So not only is it including spending on efficiency programs, but also enabling strategies as well, which include a number of different things. It can include work to promote codes and standards, but it can also include undertaking conservation potential studies or marketing and awareness for programs and so on and so forth.

I realized I didn’t explain this on the last chart, but there is a component on this that you might notice is called multi fuel. And maybe that’s a little bit confusing because it’s a pretty big component of the spending in this chart. Multi fuel is effectively two things there for some program administrators that we collect data from, we’re not able to break out the spending between natural gas and non-regulated fuels.

But it is either for one of those two energy sources and then also for some other program administrators, enabling policies spending is included in that. So the multi fuel category is somewhat larger in the spending. This year we found that continuation of a plateau effectively, which is not great.

You can see that spending increased consecutively in each of the three years from 2016 to 2018 and then declined a little bit and has remained steady. So we’re really hoping that this isn’t a long term trend because we really need to see budgets for energy efficiency programs continue to increase if we would like to hit our climate change goals for 2030.

Okay. And finally, a quick look at the overall results for this year. So as Alyssa mentioned, we benchmark the provinces across five different areas, which are programs, enabling buildings, trans, and industry. This chart is showing you the rounded total score for each province or territory in those policy areas.

Because the scores are rounded, they might not add up. So save that question if that occurred to you. And the darker boxes are the province that led in that So this year we had a couple interesting movements in rank. We typically don’t like to focus on

the raw score that a province gets year in and year out because of the slight changes in methodology we make. We prefer instead to look at the ranks. And so you can see that there’s some horizontal white bars here. Those are cordoning the provinces off into tiers as we see it based on where they fall in a kind of 10 point score range. So you’ve got down at the bottom there from 10 to 19, and then second tier Manitoba in the 20 to 29 range, and so on and so forth. So a couple interesting things this year. Not only did Nova Scotia break into the top tier for the first time, they also surpassed Quebec to take second place for the first time in the four years that we’ve done this. BC stayed in first place. But Nova Scotia did manage to eek out a win, or not a win necessarily, but eek out just ahead of Quebec, largely due to their strength of their program spending and savings. But Brendan will talk a little bit more to that.

The other kind of interesting development was that PEI managed to just surpass Ontario and take fourth place just by a hair. The scores look like it’s tied but I’m pretty sure the raw score has PEI up by a quarter point, and that is largely due to PEI’s commitments in the buildings section, committing to get to net zero energy ready buildings by 2030. Outside of that as a Alyssa noted, this is the first year that we’ve been able to include Yukon on nearly all the metrics. And as you can see, they performed quite admirably taking six place. And that’s the overall summary of the top level results.

So now I will pass it over to Brendan and he’ll go into a little bit more detail for each province and territory.

Brendan Haley:

Hi everyone. In this scorecard we collect data, we collect comparative data, and there’s lots of different ways you can compare across the provinces. But we also do our best to understand the unfolding of events and the context in each province and territory as best we can.

So at the end of the report you’ll find a summary for each province, and that includes it right up on major events that have occurred in that province over the past year. Events we anticipate might. It gives us an opportunity to discuss policy commitments that you might see in things like climate plans that will not make their way into the scoring because the scoring has a particular period of analysis.

It’s also about performance and policies that are implemented and not committed to. But I’m going to, now fairly quickly walk through really some interesting policy stories that we see in the different provinces and territories this year. So if we go to the top province, which is BC, the Clean BC plan has a number of nation leading policy initiatives and just a short list. BC is now committing to developing and implementing a zero carbon new building code by 2030. So that will add emission considerations to the net zero energy ready standard that they’ve had in place. And that makes up some of the new federal building codes.

The province is now consulting on making all new space and water heating at least a hundred percent efficient by 2030. So that will go a long way to incenting heat pumps. All new home listings will require an energy efficiency label. Then on the utility side, the province plans to place GHG caps on natural gas utilities, and phase out utility incentives for traditional gas space and water heating.

And so consultations are also underway on that policy change now. If you’re a utility regulation person, you might also be interested to know that they’re looking at changing cost effectiveness testing from a total resource cost test to a utility cost test, which tends to really give a boost in efficiency programs.

So as BC implements these policies, they’re gonna continue to do well on future scorecards. We like to highlight opportunities we see in different provinces. So for BC we’re talking about using energy efficiency strategies to manage the extreme heat events the province has started to experience, such as coupling the deployment of air conditioning with heat pumps and implementing minimum efficiency performance standards for high rise buildings.

Second is this idea of taking a mission oriented approach. So BC’s an interesting case I think of some of the policy constraints of utility demand side management which do very well in, in sending the deployment of proven solutions, yet it’s a little bit more difficult to take risks to explore solutions that are either uncertain or perhaps are not cost effective today, but need to be in the future.

So we see the BC utilities, not targeting all cost effective energy efficiency identified due to uncertainties over the level of participation in their programs. So we’re suggesting this mission oriented approach existing alongside utility dsm that can really welcome uncertainty as a way to learn and as a way to explore new energy saving strategies.

So moving to Nova Scotia. The second place finish there is principally explained by higher program savings than previous years, as well as higher spending in equity focused areas related to low income and indigenous community programs. And this is gonna continue the latest electricity efficiency plan aims to spend 20% of the entire budget on under-resourced communities. So Nova Scotia is a province with a big goal to hit net zero emissions. One obvious way to align efficiency policy with that net zero goal is to make all new buildings net zero energy ready, that standard is now defined under the new national model building codes.

All right. If we move to Quebec the big strength remains transportation in Quebec. That’s not just electric vehicles. That’s also the highest per capita transit funding and the highest per capita ridership. Probably the most interesting thing coming outta Quebec is the dual fuel heating program that launched this summer where Hydro Quebec and the energy or natural gas utility are working together to provide incentive for systems that use electric heat pumps for most hours of the year and then leaving natural gas heat to its highest value use, essentially as a peak supply resource on those coldest days of the year. A big theme in Quebec is moving to mandatory policies. So that dual fuel program, that’s an incentive program, but with the ambition to decarbonize the entire heating system.

Doing the latter, likely requires complimentary policy approaches like we see in bc making all new heating systems, a hundred percent efficient. The other really interesting thing in Quebec is Montreal is requiring energy use reporting from large buildings, and that is expected to lead to mandatory performance standards on both GHGs and energy efficiency for those buildings. So that is a policy that could be taken province-wide and I think the rest of the country should take note of.

Let’s move to the next tier. P EI and Ontario switched places this year. P EI continues to move up and they need to, because this is the province with the most aggressive climate target in the country to hit net zero emissions by 2040.

The province continues to have quite high program savings and spending levels, especially for low income populations. A previous goal existed to hit 2% annual savings as a percentage for both electric and non-electric fuels. That would be the highest energy savings level in the country.

It’s not unrealistic cuz that level is frequently achieved by leading American states. P EI seems to be backing off that target, but we hope they strive for those nation leading energy saving goals.

Ontario is doing some really interesting things with demand response through a capacity auction, as well as location specific demand side management. Overall levels of program savings, program spending have tended to be static on the natural gas side and slowly decreasing on the electricity side. However that might be changing. The title that we had for Ontario this year is “energy efficiency to the rescue” because in September the government largely reversed budget cuts to electric efficiency to deal with a looming capacity shortage.

So Ontario I think is a very good example of a trend we’re starting to see across the country now. Provinces that we’re talking about electricity surpluses a couple years ago are starting to realize they really need energy efficiency, manage electrification and future supply retirements.

Okay. In the Yukon as James and Alyssa mentioned this is the first year we’ve included the Yukon. When we compare spending on a per capita basis, savings as a percentage of demand, Yukon is very high. They rank first in fossil fuel savings per capita spending and spending on indigenous focused programs.

They’re also committed to that net zero energy ready building code by 2032. And the territory is accomplishing all this without their utilities actively engaged in demand side management which could deliver even more savings in the future.

New Brunswick. Some really important stories have come out of New Brunswick this year that are not reflected in our scoring, but we hope will be.

So in February the auditor general for the province made extensive use of our previous scorecard findings to recommend policy changes such as sustainable funding for non-electric programs. And then in the fall new Brunswick came out with a new climate plan that has a number of strong energy efficiency policies and they’re listed in our report, but just some highlights they’re committing to that net zero Energy Ready building code by 2030; they’re further gonna go up the performance tiers that are available in the new national model code starting in 2023; they’re aiming to phase out oil heating use in the province by 2030, implement building, labeling and disclosure with energy labels at time of sale; and then creating a new fund for non-electric programs as well as targeting minimum targets for electric efficiency.

So these are all priorities we’ve discussed in previous scorecards and we’re really glad to see them in the climate plan. New Brunswick scores should improve in future years. When we benchmark, especially on low income spending and electricity savings, those commitments in New Brunswick, they’ll still be behind other jurisdictions. So in addition to, minimum goals, it’d be great to see some stretch goals in these areas.

So if we go to Manitoba, Manitoba is also doing a lot of stuff this year. Doing a new energy policy framework. So that involves a integrated resource plan with Manitoba Hydro, a new potential study for energy efficiency that’ll inform the next plan for efficiency manitoba. This year, efficiency Manitoba created a new innovation fund.

They’ve also outlined a fairly extensive suite of programs in partnership with First Nations and Metis communities. One barrier we see in Manitoba that we found through our fuel switching policy tracking which is policy nerdy, but really important, is that whenever there’s an electricity load increase due to measures like a heat pump, that’s counted against their electricity savings target.

I think that creates a perverse incentive for overall energy efficiency and GHG improvements. And it’s a good example of how I think fuel specific targets and goals, they still make a lot of sense, but they need to be supplemented perhaps with fuel neutral goals or perhaps GHG goals or a good definition of beneficial electrification and how we can promote that.

Alright, if we go to the next tier of provinces, I’m gonna go through these a little bit quicker. So in Alberta we see exciting things happening with the Alberta EcoTrust working with Edmonton and Calgary on a low income energy efficiency program on virtual energy labels. Newfoundland’s a pretty interesting place to look at electrification policy. They are doing a lot to promote electric vehicles, some heating electrification because they have a surplus coming out of Muskrat Falls.

And then Saskatchewan is last place this year. There’s very little program activity or new policy initiatives coming out of that province. However, we do see the gas utilities, Sask energy now starting to introduce some energy saving programs. And Regina has come out with a fairly aggressive energy and climate plan.

So next, the other territories other than the Yukon are not part of the scoring, as Alyssa mentioned, due to some data availabilities and comparability issues. But we benchmarked in the report where we could, so if we look at the Northwest Territories we see relatively high per capita spending about average electricity savings. Yellowknife’s also moving quite quickly to adopt the new version of the building code.

And Nunavut, one of the issues was when the federal green Homes program came out there was a lack of energy auditors in the territory. So a training program from the Arctic Renewable Society is working to resolve that.

So another aspect of the scorecard is we provide recommendations to the federal government and it’s recommendations about how to bolster provincial and territorial energy efficiency.

And if you look back to what we wrote last year, almost every single recommendation we made in last year’s scorecard was actually followed up in some way and implemented by the federal government. So that’s a good track record.

This year we’re making five recommendations. First is the suggestion that the federal government help expand low income energy efficiency programs. In March we published a report that took a deeper dive into provincial programs. We highlighted gaps that we think the federal government can help fill. And, this remains a really glaring federal policy gap. I think as energy efficiency professionals and activists it’s really our responsibility to make sure everyone can benefit from energy efficiency, not just people with higher incomes or say businesses.

So I encourage you to go to our website. We’ve got tools where you can easily write to your member of Parliament. I really encourage you to try to make this a priority for our federal government so that everyone can benefit from energy efficiency.

Second recommendation is to mandate efficient and zero carbon heating systems. That’s actually a priority in the federal minister mandate letter letters.

Third recommendation is to define what net zero building performance is, not just for new buildings but for existing buildings. And that would be really helpful for municipalities and provinces that we hope introduce mandatory building performance standards.

Fourth is to suggest a principle that federal funding should always aim to crowd in more provincial level funding and effort, and never create issues that could crowd out or even cannibalize provincial initiatives. So when new federal initiatives are designed they should really have a strong understanding of potential interactions with provincial policy systems.

So things like how are savings attributed, how cost effectiveness testing works, that federal government needs to work with those institutions. And then finally right now the federal government is developing a green building strategy. One thing we hope that strategy provides is a clear definition about what that net zero emissions end state looks like, and then providing the funding and technical assistance to go towards those end goals and we hope their policy goals. And a good example of that might be the upcoming Net zero Building Electrification Fund. That’s an example where federal funds are aimed at helping provinces and hopefully municipalities institute a policy change, right? So in this case on mandatory building energy code. Okay, so with that, I’m gonna hand it back to James to talk about our awesome database.

James Gaede:

Great. All right, thanks Brendan. If you don’t know you can access the scorecard at: scorecard.efficiencycanada.org.

And we revamped the website this year and we’re pretty excited about it. So the overview of each province and territory that we’ve covered in the scorecard that Brendan just went through are also available online. And so if you go to the main landing page, scorecard dot efficiency canada.org.

There’s a map that shows the rank of each province territory. And if you click on that, then you’ll be taken to the online version of the provincial summary. So I encourage you to check it out. It really looks good. We’re really happy with it.

And of course, you can also download the scorecard in a PDF format and get access to all of the information for all of the 54 metrics, for all of the 11 provinces and territories that we’ve covered. But also there is another thing available online, and that is the policy database, which is the kind of accompanying product as it were to the scorecard.

So the scorecard has conventionally been conceived of as a PDF report that looks at a specific Timeframe. And the four that we have done are available from scorecard dot efficiency canada.org to download. But we also maintain an online policy database that contains a lot of the information that is in the scorecard but also some things that aren’t. So policy items related to energy efficiency across the provinces and territories. You can use the database in two ways, which is to look at a specific policy area and then see all of the provinces at once. But you can also look at a province and then see all of the items for that province at once.

And you can get to the database at database do efficiency canada.org. So I just wanted to conclude the presentation by making sure that you were aware of how to get the scorecard, but also that the policy database exists and that we maintain it throughout the year and we are always looking and welcoming feedback and suggestions on how to improve it.

Or if you find any information that’s out of date, don’t hesitate to send us an email at info@efficiencycanada.org. And that concludes the bulk of our presentation.

Okay. Sharon Bode asks what will be the impacts of Bill 23 on energy efficiency? So I think Bill 23 is the build more houses faster, stronger, better bill.

Brendan Haley: Kevin on our team is tracking this closely, so yes, we’re extremely concerned about that bill, especially that it seems to disallow what’s called green development standards in municipalities. Green development standards are a way that municipalities through their bylaws and their powers have been able to require more energy efficient, lower carbon, new buildings, and whether it was an accident or not. It seems like as it’s written that might be essentially disallowed. So I encourage everyone to go to the website of the atmospheric where they have a campaign to allow you to sign off and communicate to the government that this is a problem with that act.

 We don’t track that policy in the scorecard. And it’s because it actually is a municipal policy and municipal policies outside of our scope. What we do track is provincial adoption of building codes and their ability to enable the municipalities to adopt their own building code or adopt the different tiers.

So this new building code that we have nationally now has these multiple performance tiers. And a great way to use that building code is to allow more advanced municipalities to adopt some of those tiers faster than the rest of the province. And that is the way it’s worked in British Columbia.

For a number of years now. And that’s one of the reasons BC continues to be the top of our scorecard.

James Gaede:

From Joshua Kelly: Can you comment on how energy savings and budgets and the scorecard more broadly is or may be impacted by some programs shifting from energy efficiency to GHG reduction, operational and potentially embedded? He is wondering if some of the program spending and energy might be missed if they’re under a climate or carbon umbrella instead of EE. So this is a great question. We are Efficiency Canada. We are focused on energy efficiency and so therefore the scorecard is also very much focused on energy efficiency, obviously.

Energy efficiency is one of the most important tools that we have to fight climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And so to the extent that we’ve considered that in the scorecard so far, our focus has largely been on policies and programs that use energy efficiency potentially in service of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and not necessarily coming at it from a greenhouse gas perspective first.

So suffice it to say, there most likely is activity in some of the provinces at least that have to do with greenhouse gas reductions in industry or in buildings. That may include energy efficiency improvements but most likely we would be aware of those and I feel like what we have captured in the scorecard is an accurate reflection of provincial investment in programs for energy efficiency but not necessarily the broader energy climate perspective.

Brendan Haley: Can I follow up on that? I think it’s a great question.

So I think we are missing some things. But I think that’s a big problem because, we ask for the energy numbers and if jurisdictions cannot essentially calculate how they got their ghg emission reductions from energy savings and how much of that was perhaps like energy savings versus some other issue like, chemical changes and things like that.

That suggests there’s an issue with the evaluation and monitoring of some of the GHG reduction programs. And, I think that’s a really interesting policy issue that James and I have written about is one of the strengths of traditional demand side management is that the programs are evaluated, the numbers are clear, the numbers are transparent.

And sometimes with a lot of the GHG reduction initiatives, the numbers are not very transparent and it’s not quite clear how the numbers are evaluated. So I’m hoping that in the future we focus on greenhouse gas emission. And we realign energy efficiency to focus on net zero emissions.

That’s something that we’re gonna continue to work on. But we don’t lose the ability to actually get transparent outcome data from GHG initiatives. But from what we’ve tracked, like we’re, I don’t feel like we’re missing too much. There’s definitely some initiatives in Alberta and British Columbia where I think it was hard to get data. In the maritime provinces where they do a lot of fuel oil work, it’s been hard to get data from Newfoundland and Labrador, but in the other maritime provinces, the data is quite transparent.

James Gaede: Awesome. Thanks Brendan.

Question from Nick Truder. Can you confirm how federal initiatives through NRCan, FCM, CMHC etc, are taken into consideration in the scorecard? I assume they’re excluded.

Yes. If you mean the spending that is coming from the federal government directly on those programs, this is not something that’s included in the scorecard. However transfers to the provinces through the Low Carbon Economy fund for the purposes of administering energy efficiency programs in the provinces is included in the scorecard figures. At least in terms of the program spending and savings, that’s how that works.

Brendan Haley: The federal policy recommendations that we make are not necessarily saying, This is the top priority for the federal government. It’s saying this is how the federal government can really help work well with the provinces and territories. And I guess to that point we’re making about really needing to think about how the initiatives compliment each other, touches in how we touch on the data. If a federal program is going through the provinces, right? We count that federal money, so to speak, but yeah, it doesn’t include things like, a lot of the initiatives and say like the Canada Infrastructure Bank as well, right? So if it’s just pure federal policy, it’s not counted in the scorecard.

James Gaede: There was one in the chat about extending the scorecard to municipalities. I’ll just quickly address that.

To date we’ve not done that and we don’t have any immediate plans to do that. But that is definitely something that’s on our radar and we’re thinking about it and how we can explore ways to to do something similar to the scorecard, but for cities or municipalities.

Okay. David Katz asked a question about tax credits in reference to our federal recommendation about requirements for a hundred percent efficient or net zero emissions space and water heating. And he asks if tax credits provided for that equipment could help or do a similar thing.

Brendan Haley: I think it might be. In the last federal economic statement that came out just a couple weeks ago, there was an announcement of some tax credits for clean technology. And I think out of the energy efficiency audience most interested that, that included heat pumps heat pumps and other, clean heating technologies. I think that’s exciting. The question I have, which I don’t have answered yet, is it’s for businesses, right? And I don’t know if, say someone who’s a residential contractor or even like an association of residential contractors, could, Wholesale purchase and get that tax credit for say, heat pumps going into residential properties.

That’s an open question. I suspect not in my reading of it. But that’s a question that I’ve asked around and so we’ll see.

James Gaede: Martin Green asks, thermal power stations in Canada typically reject more than 50% of their energy as heat to the environment. In Europe that heat is used for district heating. Would you consider including district heating and cooling and co-generation in the scorecard?

In the first edition of the scorecard, the 2019 scorecard, we did include a look at co-generation and combined heat and power. We came to the conclusion that it wasn’t an area that was being actively pursued by the provinces and that a lot of potential that existed had already been met. I think that’s definitely something that we can revisit and have a second look at for sure. But we did look at it in an earlier scorecard and so if you can go back to the 2019 version, you might be able to find some information that we tracked down.

Brendan Haley: We found it hard to find explicit data on that, right? Across all the provinces in particular, but it is included in some respects. For instance, if you have an industrial program that has co-generation as essentially a measure or district heating as a measure, it’s included in that way.

And then we also have a section on energy planning and community energy planning where district heating can play a really important role. So those are the areas we’re picking up on in the scorecard now. But we’re always happy to figure out how to make it better. So any ideas on where to get good data on that would be much appreciated.

James Gaede: Okay, great. Thank you, Brendan and Alyssa, and all of our participants for the excellent questions and for being interested in the things that Efficiency Canada is doing, but also our weekly discovery sessions as well. Again, if this is the first one that you’ve come to, I hope we did a good job in showing you how awesome they are.

 

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