The Future of Energy Efficiency for Homes (Ask NRCan)

Joël Houle (Host)

Welcome, everyone, to Ask NRCan! This is a podcast series where we sit down with our experts to talk about an aspect of the work that we do here at Natural Resources Canada.

Today, I’ll be talking to an engineer who works on projects and initiatives aimed at increasing energy efficiency in homes. For those of you who are new to the show, we call this series Ask NRCan because we want to hear from you. The purpose of the show is to share with you not only the type of science that we do but also why we do it.

So, at the end of the episode, if you have any questions on this topic, head to Twitter and tweet at us using the hashtag “#AskNRCAN”. Our experts will do their best to answer all relevant questions. Sounds good?  Let’s do it!

My guest today is Chris McLellan, a senior technical advisor that works for the office of Energy Efficiency at NRCan. Chris, thank you for joining us.

Chris McLellan

Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Joël

Can you start by telling us a little bit about the type of work that you do?

Chris

Okay. Well I work at the office of Energy Efficiency in the housing division, and, really, our primary focus is on improving the energy efficiency of housing for Canadians. And that includes both new housing and existing housing. So you know, we’ve run programs in the past that had incentives for people to improve the energy performance of their house, and we also run voluntary programs for builders to build better performing houses for Canadians. So that’s really what we’re looking at.

Joël

So, NRCan is looking ahead in regards to how we can build more efficient homes in Canada. Can you expand a little bit on this topic?

Chris

Sure. Well, maybe we’ll look back a little bit in history; it’s just kind of interesting. You know, NRCan’s been doing energy efficiency for housing really since the early eighties. In 1982, NRCan launched the R2000 program. And I remember as a kid, sitting around the breakfast table with my father — who’s an engineer and pretty obsessive about energy performance — then talking about this program to me, and it’s kind of funny ending up here later.

But the R200 program came out of some work that was done in Saskatchewan in the seventies, and you might have heard of the passive house program . There’s quite a bit of talk about that right now, and, really, the passive house program is taking that old R200 in Saskatchewan conservation house work that was done here and kind of repackaging and shipping it back to us. But since then we’ve continued with the R2000 program, and that was really a program that led the way for innovators. It always had a targeted energy performance that was about 50 percent better than the typical house that was being built.

More recently, we’ve brought in the ENERGYSTAR for N ew Homes program, and that’s somewhere around 20 to 25 percent better than the typical house. So these are voluntary programs. And then in about 2009, there was support from the Canadian Homebuilders Association to put energy efficiency into the National Building Code of Canada.

So, then, in 2012, the energy performance requirements were published in the code. So we ended up with this nice, sort of, ecosystem where you had the R2000 program leading the way with innovators and ground breaking work being done. And we had ENERGYSTAR for New Homes kind of picking up the mass market and getting those energy efficiency techniques and materials out there in the broader way. And then we had the code come in behind and kind of picking up those that needed a bit of help.

So, right now we’re looking at ram ping up that energy performance in the code and starting to put different performance levels in the code. So, in a way, it’s replicating what has been done in the past with voluntary programs leading the way . But we’ll end up with sort of the higher- performance energy requirements right in the code itself. And that will give the provinces and territories who are ready to move industry to higher performing houses a tool to do so through regulation at the provincial or territorial level.

So, we see in B.C. right now, there’s a lot of work that’s been going on there . They have what they call their Energy Step Code, and that’s the same sort of idea. There’s different performance levels . I think there’s about five in there, and it basically starts off with the lowest performance tier. You just need to test the air tightness of your house, model it so that we know the energy performance through simulation. And then the tiers keep going up from like 10 percent better than to 25 percent, I think, 40 percent and then roughly around 70 to 75 percent better. So we’re going to see that sort of thing happening out probably in the National Building Code as well.

Joël

If I can ask you a more technical question: reading up on this online, it says that high- performance home help homeowners benefit from better indoor air quality and fewer mold issues. The way I understand it is that this might be hard to do because energy-efficient homes tend to be more sealed, so air tends to be more stale. So then you would need to bring more air in, which would seem to lessen the efficiency of the energy consumption. How does that work?

Chris
So, you’re right. We have been building homes tighter and tighter and the reason for this is two-fold. We found air tightness is the most cost-effective way to reduce your heating load in the house. And the trade- off, though, is that you need to bring in ventilation air to make up for that. You’re not getting that natural air leakage, so you have to run a device. And, typically, what we do or what we recommend to homeowners is to get a heat recovery ventilator — an HRV, or sometimes they’re called ERV s. So these basically are air-to-air heat exchangers. So you’re exhausting your stale air from the indoors, and you’re bringing in fresh air from the outdoors. And as those two streams pass by each other in this self-contained box, heat is just transferred between the outgoing air in the winter and the incoming air in the summer. So, you’re still getting that ventilation air that you need, but you’re not having a huge energy penalty, let’s say. We know it costs energy to heat that ventilation. But because you’re transferring the heat from the outgoing to the incoming, you’re saving energy in doing so.

Joël

Oh, it’s incredible the amount of technology we have today.

Chris

It’s interesting that technology came out of that project in Saskatchewan in the seventies, and it was basically brought into the mainstream in Canada through the R2000 program. And now we’re seeing that technology being used all over the world.

Joël

So with all this new technology and the new code requirements, how does that affect the price of those houses?

Chris

Well, we’ve seen from our energy efficiency programs in the past, that it does cost more to bring this technology into a new home. Part of what’s happening with the Code is that we’ll see better adoption of these sorts of technologies. As these are adopted more fully in the market, the costs do come down; we’ve seen that in our programs. So, if you look at buying a house, you got two things that you really need to worry about; you’ve got the cost of the house, and you’ve got your operating cost. And, in a certain way, the cost of the house is going to be, typically, people have a mortgage. So they know their cost for this house as a mortgage that they might be paying monthly and then their cost for their utilities.

So as you improve the energy performance of the house, your utility cost comes down. And hopefully you could find a nice balance between where maybe your mortgage has gone up a bit, but your utility cost had come down — but, on a monthly basis, you’re spending the same amount of money. Of course there are some things that you might not see the savings that you hope for . But when we do the work on the Code, we do quite a bit of analysis to make sure that the requirements that are going in there are good for Canadians.

Joël

So if we could take a step back, I’m kind of curious to see why the Government of Canada is focusing so much on more energy efficiency homes?

Chris

I think there’s two things we’re really looking at around climate change, and one aspect of that is mitigation, so we could think of energy efficiency as part of mitigating climate change. The other aspect of that would be adaptation to climate change, and that’s also very important when we’re talking about housing. So, that is adaptation to extreme weather events: we know that there’s more frequent power outages, stronger winds, sometimes heavier snow loads. Energy- efficient houses are quite good in both of these regards. Because the more insolation you have, the less heat you need in the house, and if there is a power outage or you’re losing access to your utilities, these houses stay warmer for a longer time. So in that way, it does bring some resiliency to the housing. But, really, this is all about reducing our impact on climate change. We see about 17 percent of emissions of greenhouse gas emissions or GHGs. Quite often they’re attributed to housing in Canada, and if we can reduce our energy consumption, we know we’ll also be reducing our GHGs.

Joël

Fair enough. What can Canadians do to learn more about either buying a new energy- efficient home or learning how they could make their current home more efficient?

Chris

A good place to start is coming to NRCan’s website at the Office of Energy Efficiency. I would highly recommend getting an energy advisor, whether you’re thinking of building a new home or hiring a builder to build you a new home, or you’re thinking of renovating a home. So we have a network of registered energy advisors. They’ll come into your house, or they’ll look at your proposed building plans . They can make recommendations on the characteristics of house that would affect energy performance and help you to build a more efficient home.  Through that program — that’s the EnerGuide rating system, and I think it should be pretty easy to find information about that on our website.

Joël

Perfect. T hank you so much, Chris, for your time today.

Chris

Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.

Joël

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