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Investor-Ready Energy Efficiency certification coming to Canada

“Our cities need innovative financing mechanisms for improving building performance at scale,” said MaRS’s Shawn Peterson.

ICP is a global underwriting standard for developing and measuring energy efficiency retrofits, say the partners, and will be administered by GBCI. IREE certification signals to investors that a project has “adopted best practices that can help reduce transaction costs and increase savings … [offering] investors a consistent roadmap for assessing risk and expected outcomes from deep retrofits”.

CaGBC’s Thomas Mueller says Canada’s existing building stock has the potential to reduce overall building emissions by up to 51% by 2030. “The biggest barrier for the industry and ownership is access to financing.”

IREE-certified projects will provide “clarity on the long-term performance of energy efficiency technologies, and provide the necessary assurance required to create greater access to competitive financing, which will be necessary to achieve retrofits on a large scale”.

Supported by the Ministry of Energy in Ontario, the Advanced Energy Centre at MaRS will pilot the ICP methodology in Canada. It will bring together a multi-sectoral group comprising owners, government, engineering firms, utilities and financial institutions with the goal of determining how ICP can help facilitate more retrofits.

The next steps for the ICP program will be to recruit Canadian projects for IREE certification in February 2018, followed by the initiation of a pilot in Summer 2019. For more information on ICP in Canada, visit the MaRS Discovery District website.

— Photo Redd Angelo.