There are plans for Canada’s largest green renovation – all federal buildings in the Ottawa region

It’s no exaggeration to call Yuill Herbert from Canada a climate adaptation guru. The Director of the Sustainability Solutions Group (SSG) has worked on climate adaptation action plans for 40 communities, including some of Canada’s largest cities, including Toronto and Vancouver.

His latest endeavor, a decarbonization strategy for all federal buildings in the National Capital Region, is a roadmap for an extraordinary project that could lead to Canada’s largest massive building modernization scheme. Think 2,200 times home renovations, except the scale of each job is thousands of times greater because these are buildings with a combined footprint of about 6 million square feet.

And with more than 100,000 officials working on the buildings, there is a lot of planning involved to create the least amount of disturbance.

Herbert’s team started with many meetings.

“We met with 30 government departments, from the secret service to public works and everyone in between,” said Herbert, who spoke about the plan in Glasgow at a COP26 side event.

SSG examined each of the 2,200 federal buildings in the region, ranging from the Neo-Gothic Parliament Buildings built in the mid-19th century to new LEED standard office buildings that are already energy efficient. He discovered that it was possible to convert government buildings in the region into net zero emissions.

Herbert said the cost of renovations could run as high as $ 25 billion between 2020 and 2050. It’s a massive public expense, no doubt.

“But it will create a ton of jobs in the process,” Herbert said, and it will provide a much-needed boost to the sluggish post-pandemic economy. The SSG report found that the modernization project would create 46,000 person-years of direct employment and another 22,000 person-years of indirect employment.

The government doesn’t have many options, Herbert said. “They have to spend that anyway, because their building stock is falling.”

Heat pumps are the most expensive

The biggest challenge will be changing the existing gas district energy heating system. It consists of multiple gas boilers that pump steam through pipes to heat buildings. “The system,” says Herbert, “is as old as it sounds.

Switching to electric heat pumps is the most challenging and expensive part of modernization. Care must be taken to combine electrification with deep energy-efficient renovations to prevent the grid from going down during peak office hours, according to the SSG report.

But perhaps the most important thing about the report was discovering the significant savings that can be made by getting the job done all at once.

“The cost of making modifications to scale reduces the cost of some capital expenditures by 30 percent,” Herbert said.

It is also the only way the government can meet its own sustainability goals, he adds. The Treasury Board Green governance strategy has an ambitious goal of operating with zero net emissions by 2050, which includes all government-owned and leased properties. That means reducing greenhouse gas emissions as close to zero as possible and balancing all remaining emissions with the equivalent amount of carbon removal, the report states.

Work at scale to save time

Approvals to do the job generally take five to eight years, as they go through the Treasury and Finance Board, Herbert said. Therefore, the only practical way to achieve the goal is to do everything at once.

Changing the heating system is far from the only challenge. Windows need to be replaced by the thousands. “We do that at night, to keep people in their place,” Herbert said.

And like all companies with staff that are now used to working at home during the pandemic, the government should start by assessing how much space they really need in the future, he added. Plans can be made for staff to work at home while modifications are being made.

As for the buildings that could be left empty once the space count is completed, there is talk of converting them into social housing. But that’s a project for another day.