A federal Kyoto plan to offer homeowners up to $90 million for upgrades that save energy and cut greenhouse gas emissions must also support innovative technologies and include the large-buildings sector, energy and climate change experts say.

Ottawa’s incentive-based rebate plan is what the Alberta government should have done a couple of years ago, instead of paying one-time-only cash rebates to every homeowner to offset skyrocketing natural gas and electricity bills, said Tang Lee, a professor in the University of Calgary’s environmental design faculty.

The provincial rebate program “was very short-sighted and it really doesn’t have any legacy,” he said.

Lee, an architect, building scientist and environmental health expert, has spent 25 years designing buildings – from single-family homes to large churches – that tap energy from the sun and the Earth. He said Ottawa shouldn’t restrict its new Kyoto accord-driven program only to conventional activities such as adding extra insulation or replacing the home furnace.

Mike Sturk photo, Business Edge
University of Calgary environmental design professor Tang Lee

The program should also help encourage wider use of innovative technologies such as solar heat and power, which are proven to cut energy costs and greenhouse gases, Lee said. “They have to look at the best place to put the investment.”

Ottawa is planning a massive campaign to involve all Canadians in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, to help meet the country’s target under the international Kyoto climate-change accord.

The national program will be on a scale akin to the ParticipAction campaign started in 1971 to promote fitness, sources close to the federal plan told Business Edge. ParticipAction goaded Canadians over the years with ads suggesting a 60-year-old Swede was as fit as or fitter than a 30-year-old Canadian.

The Kyoto initiative is called the One Tonne Challenge, meaning each Canadian will be encouraged to voluntarily reduce his or her greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent, or about one tonne a year.

“In order to engage the entire country in the effort, working on people’s homes is something that everybody can do,” says Simon Knight, Edmonton director of Alberta’s Climate Change Central, a public-private partnership co-ordinating efforts to reduce greenhouse gases in the province.

Climate Change Central has offered to help the federal government market and promote the new program for homeowners, Knight said.

“We feel it’s an important way to engage the consumer in acting on climate change,” he said.

“A properly run program will result in emission reductions across the residential sector.”

The program is expected to include $70 - $90 million in initial funding for homeowners. The money will be paid as rebates averaging $1,000 each, for purchasing energy-efficient appliances and technologies, and doing renovations to reduce home energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

Ottawa was poised to announce the program last month, but had to delay it until the federal Treasury Board scrutinized the expenditure, sources said. An announcement is now expected later this summer. Stephen Farrell, who owns VerdaTech Inc., a Calgary-based company that offers energy-consulting services to homeowners, says he expects the rebates will be tied to the amount of greenhouse gases reduced, rather than to how much homeowners spend on new appliances or energy-efficiency renovations.

For example, a homeowner might spend $3,000 to replace a 25-year-old furnace, while his neighbour shells out $12,000 for super-energy-efficient windows throughout his house.

The homeowner with the new furnace is likely to get a bigger rebate, even though he spent less, because his upgrade will reduce more greenhouse gas emissions than his neighbour’s new windows, Farrell said.

“The objective of the program and the intention is to not help pay for renovations,” he noted. “It’s to help pay for greenhouse emission-reduction renovations.”

Critics argue that previous federal incentive programs to encourage energy efficiency, such as the CHIP program in the 1970s that gave homeowners an income-tax deduction for upgrading their house’s insulation, were abused by fly-by-night firms and made little impact in lowering energy demand and consumption.

But Farrell and others say there’s ample proof – including the before-and-after difference in utility bills – that properly done energy-efficiency upgrades can cut natural gas and electricity consumption and reduce emissions.

“An average house can quite easily do five to six tonnes of greenhouse gas emission reduction per year, by making cost-effective changes,” Farrell said.

Don Allen, owner of Excalibur Efficient Buildings Ltd. in Calgary, says he has more work than he can handle doing energy-efficiency upgrades of large residential complexes and business buildings, including hospitals, office towers and schools.

“Some buildings don’t waste energy,” he said. “But some of the brand-new buildings that are put up are worse than buildings from 20 years ago – unbelievable.”

Just replacing inefficient lightbulbs with highly efficient fluorescent lighting can take a chunk out of a large building’s electric bill, Allen said.

The federal government’s climate-change plan calls for 20 per cent of Canada’s commercial building stock to be energy-retrofitted by 2010. Existing federal programs, such as the Commercial Building Incentives, help owners of institutional, commercial and industrial buildings do retrofits.

But these programs need to be made simpler to access and they require more funding to really engage the large-building sector, says Jeff Morrison, director of communications for the Canadian Construction Association (CCA).

The CCA and several other national organizations have formed the Industry Task Force on Green Buildings, and are lobbying Ottawa for an incentive program similar to the one for homeowners to be made available to the large- building sector.

Morrison said the owner of a big hotel, for example, would be more inclined to tackle a multimillion-dollar retrofit if Ottawa contributed $100,000 or more, especially if energy costs keep rising as predicted.

Knight, at Climate Change Central, said he anticipates that the federal government will come up with additional funding to extend the Commercial Buildings Incentive program beyond the end of 2004, when it’s scheduled to expire.

Climate Change Central will present a proposal this month to the Alberta government that the province supplement the federal funding, to make the program more attractive for building owners, Knight said.

Farrell said his VerdaTech firm has more than 4,500 homeowner-customers who have made an initial $150 investment for an expert evaluation of their energy use and the most cost-effective ways to reduce it. Most Albertans – stung by rising gas and electricity bills – are more interested in saving money than in saving the planet from climate change, he acknowledged.

“What I believe is, we can do something good for the environment. And we can do something good for our pocketbook,” Farrell said.

“Whether you believe or don’t believe in Kyoto, it doesn’t matter.”