A lot of quiet, steady work is unfolding right now across Canada—increasingly developing sophisticated approaches to help accelerate building retrofits.
Thirteen retrofit accelerators are now in full swing across the country, including four hosted or supported by local LC3 Centres: The Atmospheric Fund, the Zero Emissions Innovation Centre, Alberta Ecotrust’s Climate Innovation Fund, and the Halifax Climate Investment, Innovation and Impact Fund, which sponsors an accelerator delivered by a partner organization. These accelerators aim to significantly increase the speed, scale and quality of retrofits by coordinating financing, technical expertise, project delivery and stakeholder engagement in a streamlined, replicable way. True to LC3’s modus operandi, this work is also finding ways to support equitable benefits, such as Indigenous workforce training, local government capacity building, culturally sensitive planning, social contracting and equitydeserving community project development.
Funded by Natural Resources Canada’s Deep Retrofit Accelerator program, each accelerator is applying new approaches to capture more value, more quickly, from energy performance upgrades in existing buildings. The potential impact of these accelerators recently received a boost through $500,000 in funding provided by the RBC Foundation to the Alberta Ecotrust Foundation on behalf of the LC3 Network. The funding will support collaborative LC3 Network projects focused on buildings and on learning and evaluation efforts.
“The LC3 Network plays an important role in facilitating innovative climate action in major cities right across Canada”, said Thea Silver, Senior Director, Environmental Impact, RBC. “One thing that makes the LC3 Network so powerful is how it provides local LC3 Centres with shared tools and resources with the flexibility to apply them in ways that meet the specific needs of each community. It also helps solutions developed in one area of the country to be scaled out to other Centres, strengthening the whole Network. This is the kind of climate action RBC Foundation is proud to support.”
Building momentum
The first project funded by RBC Foundation’s donation supported the emerging Canada Retrofit Accelerator Network by proactively capturing lessons from all 13 retrofit accelerators and translating them into tangible learning outcomes to inform future growth of the sector.
Demand for retrofits is growing, but Canada lacks the market infrastructure needed to scale projects into construction. This results in projects stalling between planning and implementation phases, constraining the ability to aggregate and scale investment and slowing the delivery of positive economic, housing and energy outcomes.
That’s why the accelerators’ work is not only about the simple tallies of buildings served and energy savings achieved. They are rebuilding the retrofit industry by making the business case for retrofits, creating new sources of value, and reshaping market interactions. Working on both the demand diffusion and side opportunities, accelerators are modernizing the retrofit economy, fostering experimentation and market diffusion and facilitating data-driven decision making and planning focused on scale-up.
Retrofit accelerator work reflects the diverse approaches and needs in each region. Activities include industry capacity building and integrated project delivery models that bring together contributions from owners, designers and contractors, establishing new approaches to pre-qualify retrofit service delivery agents, and trying and sharing results on new products—for example demonstrating and scaling the use of prefabricated exterior insulated cladding. Accelerators are
also facilitating data-driven decision-making and planning to help building and portfolio owners transition from ad-hoc project to portfolio-wide energy and emission reduction strategies aligned with facility renewal cycles.
Taking it to the next level
Working across regional markets, accelerators are bringing together a highly fragmented sector by reshaping market interactions and aligning market activities by scaling out services across multiple regions and market segments, and co-ordinating with the utility sector. As a result, they have significantly scaled up the national retrofit funnel to a level that did not previously exist, with over 35,000 buildings assessed and 3,000 buildings in active retrofit planning stages.
LC3 is grateful for the support from the RBC Foundation that allows us to harvest key findings from place-based climate action work across Canada, and to use the combined insights to continuously improve scale-up in this sector. The lessons captured from the combined experience create important insights about how to strengthen, deepen, and speed up retrofit work in Canadian cities over the coming decade.
We are now at a critical inflection point for retrofit scaling with hundreds of retrofit projects underway and thousands more ready to help unlock economic growth, create skilled jobs, reduce emissions and improve energy security and affordability. What is needed now is a commitment to maintain Canada’s retrofit acceleration capacity to complete the path to scale.