Canada’s Federal Government Invests in Energy Efficient Buildings with Introba

On November 16, the Canadian government announced federal funding for built environment partners, including Introba, in driving innovative solutions for decarbonization and energy efficiency for the province of British Columbia.

The investment supports our ongoing work with the provincial government of B.C. and other local industry partners via the Net-Zero Energy-Ready Challenge as part of the Better Buildings BC program. This innovative program — which Introba designed and launched in 2018 —provides incentives and support to high-rise residential, office, retail/commercial, institutional, and other large complex building projects designed to meet a net-zero energy-ready level of performance.

Only buildings that achieve the top step of the BC Energy Step Code, the highest step of the City of Vancouver’s Zero Emissions Building Plan, and Passive House certification made the cut. Our team continues to administer the program, following each of the 10 winning applications through design, construction, and operations to track, measure, evaluate, and report on their successes and lessons learned.

Julie Dabrusin, Parliamentary Secretary to Canada’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources and Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, met with Stuart Hood, Introba Vice-President, and Harriet Lilley, Senior Decarbonization Planner, on November 16 as part of the federal announcement and to discuss trends and opportunities in the built environment.

“The Better Buildings BC program will collate real data to assess how these buildings are performing that will help us assess and close the performance gap, and then share those learnings across the industry,” says Stuart. “We will be able to identify successful design strategies that achieve high levels of performance, as well as meet other criteria, such as the health and well-being of building occupants and climate resilience.” 

The program has brough into sharp focus the wave of expertise and effort across all the province from policy-makers, architects, engineers, designers, modellers, contractors, construction managers, and builders involved in the design and construction of the winning projects.

We will issue a series of 10 definitive case studies at the end of program to report back on how the buildings performed, thereby closing the loop between design and performance. In the meantime, ZEBx has already produced a series of case studies and playbooks on some of the projects. 

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Photo: (from left) Stuart Hood, Julie Dabrusin, Harriet Lilley and Raoul Jamie of QuadReal Property Group.