June 2024
By Mike Mellross, VP, Alberta Ecotrust Foundation
A new idea is spreading across the nation, finding fertile ground in the construction industry, government and LC3 Centres, reinforcing the idea that healthy networks help to rapidly scale out great local ideas.
Alberta Ecotrust Foundation hosts the Calgary and Edmonton Climate Innovation Funds – two LC3 Centres that are accelerating urban climate solutions. We are pleased to be advancing an important local initiative that both draws from and is influencing other similar LC3 initiatives across the country.
Formally launched in December 2023, the Emissions-Neutral Buildings Information Exchange (ENBIX) brings together partners who have the shared goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the construction, renovation and operation of buildings. Hosted by Alberta Ecotrust Foundation and a key initiative of our the Climate Innovation Fund, the goal of this industry-led initiative is to accelerate the transition to an emissions-neutral built environment for new and existing buildings across Alberta.
The initiative promotes the free and rapid sharing of innovative ideas, solutions, best practices and lessons learned among a broad cross-section of interested parties in the building and construction ecosystem. Programs focus on supports like providing information on industry training opportunities, bringing together peer groups for the building industry and for municipal administrators and zeroing in on hot emissions-neutral building topics like embodied carbon.
“The launch of ENBIX marks a pivotal moment in our industry’s commitment to high performance buildings, especially in terms of long-term energy consumption and carbon footprint,” said Bill Black, President and Chief Operating Officer, Calgary Construction Association. “By focusing on realistic solutions, and through collaboration and knowledge sharing, the leaders in our construction industry are taking proactive steps to mitigate our carbon footprint and contribute to a greener, cleaner future.”
Through targeted partnerships, ENBIX is also offering a commercial and multi-unit building retrofit financing program, supported by SOFIAC and Efficiency Capital (the latter a building retrofit finance business incubated by LC3 member, The Atmospheric Fund).
ENBIX is industry-governed, with foundational support from the City of Calgary, the Calgary Construction Association, the City of Edmonton and its Emissions Neutral Building Industry Advisory Group, and the Smart Sustainable Resilient Infrastructure Association. And in case you’d like to launch your own building exchange centre, Alberta Ecotrust has captured and shared the ENBIX start-up experience in a report called Shaping the Exchange.
ENBIX is based on similar successful models including British Columbia’s Zero Emissions Building Exchange (ZEBx). Launched in 2018, ZEBx joined with Vancouver’s LC3 Centre, the Zero Emissions Innovation Centre (ZEIC), in 2022. Like ENBIX, ZEBx is an industry hub, facilitating knowledge exchange to accelerate market transformation in the buildings sector to achieve net-zero goals. Both initiatives hinge on the idea that this transformation goal requires capacity at the workforce level, leadership and support from industry, and rapid peer-to-peer sharing of best new ideas. During the development of ENBIX, the ZEBx team provided support and guidance stemming from the lessons they learned from early years of operations. They also provided information to industry about the relationship between ZEBx and industry in BC to industry partners in Alberta. And when developing the results-based management framework for ENBIX, the success metrics developed and tracked by ZEBx were utilized.
Meanwhile, the Halifax LC3 Centre, the Halifax Climate Investment, Innovation and Impact Fund (HCi3) has provided $80,000 in funding for another multi-party building exchange program that is preparing Nova Scotia’s building sector for a net-zero future. The Building to Zero Exchange, (BTZx) is now live, supporting collaboration and growing capacity to scale up the creation of high-performance buildings, leveraging the wisdom of diverse stakeholder voices.
With three advanced energy performance building exchanges now launched, we have critically important building industry experience being actively facilitated locally and across the LC3 Network.