Understanding the City of Vancouver’s new carbon pollution limits  

In response to the City of Vancouver’s Climate Emergency Action Plan, Vancouver City Council approved recommendations this past May to introduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emission regulations for existing large commercial and retail buildings. The regulations include GHG intensity (GHGi) limits and heat energy limits, as well as annual energy and carbon reporting requirements.

The GHG emissions and heating energy limits for these building types will require owners and energy utilities to plan for deep carbon retrofits and investments in alternative energy sources. Key highlights:

• The energy and carbon reporting requirements come into effect in 2024.
• The GHGi limits come into effect in 2026, with a proposed $350/tonne CO2e fee for emissions that exceed the limit.
• The heating energy limits come into effect in 2040, with a proposed $100/gigajoule fee for heating energy that exceeds the limit.

Other regions and cities, including Metro Vancouver, are now also considering following suit and introducing GHGi and heating energy limits for their regions.

Although the limits are a positive step towards decarbonizing the building sector, much work remains to be done to make these buildings comply with the regulations. Currently, many buildings do not meet the limits stipulated in the bylaw. According to PUMA’s 2021 office building benchmarking report only 10 per cent  of buildings within the dataset currently fall within 2040 heat energy limits, 80 per cent fall within the 2026 GHGi limits, and 2 per cent fall within the 2040 GHGi net-zero limits. Although 2026 and 2040 may seem like the distant future, retrofitting buildings to achieve the deep reductions targeted takes several years, effort and cost. Getting an early start on this work is critically important.

The good news is that help is available. Several programs can be leveraged to support the transition to lower GHGi and heating energy in existing buildings.

• Deep carbon retrofit studies to assess potential technical solutions are often a great place to begin and allow for planning of upgrades over time.
• Low-carbon electrification and heating plant upgrades can be effective ways to reduce building GHGi and heating energy consumption.
• The PUMA online monitoring platform also offers an effective way to track carbon and energy  to meet the reporting requirements the City of Vancouver will begin enforcing in 2024.
• Various funding streams also exist to help you move forward with these initiatives — check out this article we wrote recently on rebates and incentives.

Interested in finding out more about these new regulations and what they mean for your buildings?

Feel free to reach out to us — we’d be happy to chat. Contact Iram Green, Energy Team Lead, at iram@prismgengineering.com.

Whether you are a curious client or an interested career explorer, do you ever wonder what Prism’s Energy Engineers do in a typical day?

We are excited to be featuring a day in the life of Lizz Hodgson, P.Eng., one of the Energy Engineers working out of our Nelson office.

“I typically get into the office around 9 a.m. with my dog, Otago,” Lizz tells us. “We settle in by grabbing some water or a coffee and touching base with my team members before logging onto my computer. Having Otago here brings some levity to the office – he has quite a presence! I love that the casual setting we have allows me to include him in my office days.”

Lizz’s mornings usually involve some administrative preparation, such as coordinating site visits, gathering utility data, and scheduling planning sessions with colleagues or clients.

For example, the weekly Monday morning planning meetings gather all of Prism’s Energy team members together online from our Nelson, Kelowna, and Burnaby offices to review project priorities for the week and to highlight areas on which team members can collaborate and support each other.

Lizz’s afternoons are often filled with client meetings, presentations, facilitating workshops, or project work such as energy modelling and analysis.

On a few days each week, Lizz uses her lunch break to fit in some exercise. She visits the gym at the local recreation centre, two blocks away. She also attends a circus training school, Discover Circus, that’s located in the same building as our Nelson office. The school’s aerial silks classes allow her to engage with her artistic self and take a social break. It’s great exercise, too, she says.

“It has become important to my mental health to create work–life balance,” she says. “Living in Nelson and working for Prism allows me to keep work and play close together. I can step away from the computer to do something completely different by challenging myself physically. I come back to the office feeling accomplished and ready to tackle the rest of the day!”

On a recent fall day, we caught up with her as she was preparing to lead a 90-minute workshop for a local municipality. Lizz is the technical service area lead for Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) Planning, and she has been working with the municipality on an emissions reduction pathway feasibility study. She told us that, before the study is finalized, she will incorporate feedback from stakeholders and facilitate the discussion around the identified pathways as part of the process to foster organizational buy-in.

As with any of our Energy Engineers, Lizz’s level of involvement varies from project to project and depends on each client’s needs. For example, organizations that have their own sustainability and energy teams may already have a decision framework in place to help guide their discussions. The objectives of these discussions are to identify barriers to implementation, ensure the recommended measures are within the decision framework, gain engagement from stakeholders, and guide the setting of priorities to meet the client’s goals and targets. Clients that don’t have that kind of in-house expertise may require more of Lizz’s involvement to help them determine targets and solutions, engage stakeholders, and set client-appropriate priorities.

The work is diverse and stimulating.

“I enjoy the varied nature of my role at Prism and look forward to new challenges my projects bring me each day,” Lizz says. “I’m not always writing technical reports — I’m often on site, I’m leading workshops, I’m researching new technology. Even when I’m at my desk, I collaborate with various engineering teams within Prism to create thoughtful and integrated solutions for our clients. Along with enjoying the people I work with, I get lots of learning opportunities too.”

Two additional BC School Districts are now using PUMA (Prism Utility Monitoring and Analysis) to help them manage their energy and utility costs. PUMA is pleased to welcome School District 43 – Coquitlam and School District 92 – Nisga’a as new clients.

PUMA’s benchmarking capacity is a key draw for organizations like school districts because it helps them answer the question: How does this building compare to other similar buildings?

Benchmarking can provide valuable data for a small School District like Nisga’a, which is comprised of four schools Northwest of Terrace. PUMA’s benchmarking capacity allows SD 92 to compare its sites to sites of other school districts in the province providing a broader frame of reference for how much energy is being used. Similarly, a larger school district like SD 43 can use PUMA data to compare their sites’ performance to other larger school districts which helps in setting realistic targets.

PUMA is built to provide the information energy managers need to do their jobs effectively – including accurate and timely data collection, weather adjustment using baseline models and weather normalization, greenhouse gas reporting, and costs calculations. School districts use PUMA to drive operational improvements that reduce energy costs.

Of equal importance is that PUMA is supported by Prism Engineering’s team of technical staff who are passionate about saving energy and have played a leading role in Energy Management in BC and Western Canada for the past 25 years.