COVID-19 has intensified pressure to support physical, social and emotional well-being within the built environment, but many investors, owners and managers were already embracing healthy building principles ahead of pandemic-triggered challenges.

Canadian commercial real estate assets are comparatively less exposed to the dire physical threats that extreme weather poses or has already served up in other global regions.

A new slate of conservation and demand management (CDM) programs allocates $456 million for commercial, institutional and industrial consumers over the four-year period from 2021-24.

The agreement outlines how ASHRAE and CIBSE will work cooperatively to promote a more sustainable built environment through HVAC&R technology.

The commercial real estate, facilities management and construction/retrofit sectors appear poised to capture a share of the spending announced in the Canadian government’s fall economic statement.

Multifamily and industrial properties are routinely lumped together as favoured investment assets, but asset managers face divergent degrees of difficulty when they seek to mine value from energy performance.

More than 50 per cent of participating Canadian portfolios were grouped in the top two brackets of results, with 11 earning 5-star status and six attaining a 4-star rating.

Efficiency Canada’s second annual provincial scorecard takes a detailed look at commitment, outcomes and potential related to 42 energy efficiency indicators, and charts progress, or backsliding, against last year’s results.

The 2020 race2reduce field boasts more than 1,730 buildings encompassing 248 million square feet of space in common areas and tenant premises — an increase from 650 buildings covering 95 million square feet in 2019.

PACE financing is an innovative green loan instrument that can help owners with building retrofits to reduce carbon pollution.

A promised $2 billion investment in large-scale building retrofits will be central to the Canadian government’s job creation ambitions. Energy efficiency champions have plenty of ideas of how and where the funds could be best leveraged.

The World Trade Organization agreed with Canada that the U.S. conflated wholesale and retail electricity rates to arrive at its supposition that B.C. and Quebec hydro utilities overpaid for biomass power.

Residential consumption is identified as a primary concern and opportunity for the 2021-24 period, along with a continued emphasis on reducing system-wide peak demand

A temporary adjustment to Ontario’s electricity pricing scheme eliminates cost-saving opportunities that many operators of large commercial buildings were anticipating this summer.

The City of Winnipeg has invited commercial building owners and institutional facility managers to affix their Energy Star Portfolio Manager results on a publicly accessible map.

The timing might have been opportune for uptake of the measure — provided it was adopted into provincial and territorial building codes — because it would have applied broadly in what is currently Canada’s most buoyant commercial real estate sector.

For Class A consumers, cost-saving potential will be diminished even if they successfully curtail demand during the five peak hours since those peaks are expected to be lower than usual.