Commercial and Institutional Consumption of Energy Survey (CICES), December 2005

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1. Energy consumption and energy intensity in Canada

For the purposes of this survey, the commercial and institutional sector has been defined using categories taken from the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). A complete list of the activity sectors making up the commercial and institutional sector is provided in Appendix A.

Table 1 shows all of the survey results for each activity sector: number of establishments, energy consumption (expressed in gigajoules [GJ]), floor area (expressed in square metres [m²]) and energy intensity (expressed in gigajoules per square metre [GJ/m²]).

Table 1
Number of establishments, energy consumption, floor area and energy intensity, 2004

Sector or subsector	Number of establishments	Energy consumption (GJ)	Floor area (m²)	Energy intensity (GJ/m²)
Wholesale and warehousing	38 887 B	157 194 620 B	72 052 176 A	2.18 A
Retail trade	96 911 A	107 143 833 A	75 623 857 A	1.42 A
Non-food retail	82 772 A	85 461 095 B	64 100 371 A	1.33 A
Food retail	14 139 B	21 682 738 B	11 523 486 B	1.88 B
Information and cultural industries	6 510 A	11 299 637 B	8 523 401 A	1.33 A
Officea	82 029 A	132 193 423 A	107 733 234 B	1.23 A
Education	15 808 A	153 540 138 A	120 866 456 A	1.27 A
Elementary and secondary schools	15 473 A	103 788 616 A	92 597 507 A	1.12 A
Colleges and cégeps	217 A	14 471 605 A	10 993 183 A	1.32 A
Universities	118 A	35 279 917 A	17 275 766 A	2.04 A
Health care	33 384 A	104 610 995 A	68 112 296 A	1.54 A
Non-hospital health care	32 654 A	40 758 566 A	43 525 877 B	0.94 A
Hospitals	730 A	63 852 430 A	24 586 419 A	2.60 A
Accommodation and food services	38 306 A	64 267 000 A	29 034 773 A	2.21 A
Other (Commercial/ institutional)	68 096 D	214 737 596 D	109 018 114 D	1.97 D
TOTAL	379 930 A	944 987 242 A	590 964 306 A	1.60 A

^a The Office sector includes the activities of finance and insurance; real estate, rental and leasing; professional, scientific and technical services; and public administration.

The letter to the right of each estimate indicates its quality, as follows: A – excellent, B – good, C – acceptable, D – use with caution, F – too unreliable to be published.

Due to rounding, the numbers may not add up to the total shown, and some numbers may differ slightly from one table to the next.

Number of establishments and floor area

Based on CICES data, there were an estimated 379 930 commercial and institutional establishments in Canada in 2004. Of these, retail trade accounted for the largest share, with 26 percent of all establishments, followed by offices, with 22 percent.

Survey data also indicate that commercial and institutional establishments in Canada covered nearly 591 square kilometres in 2004, an area larger than Montreal Island. Education accounted for the largest share of floor area, with 20 percent of the total floor area, followed by the office sector, with 18 percent. Floor area is the total floor area of all the establishments in a sector, excluding indoor parking and mechanical rooms.

Energy consumption

Total energy consumption equals the sum of the use of electricity, natural gas, diesel, propane, heavy fuel oil, other middle distillates, steam and wood. It is measured in gigajoules (GJ)¹.

In 2004, commercial and institutional establishments consumed nearly 945 million GJ. This is equivalent to the average annual consumption of approximately 7.9 million Canadian households, and is nearly five times the amount of energy used by all private dwellings in a city likeToronto².

The wholesale trade and warehousing sector used the most energy (not counting the residual sector Other). It alone accounted for 17 percent of all commercial and institutional energy use, even though it had only 10 percent of the total number of establishments and 12 percent of total floor area. The education sector (16 percent) and the office sector (14 percent) also accounted for a significant share of total energy use.

Energy intensity

The data obtained on each establishment's energy consumption and floor area are used to calculate its energy-intensity ratio.³ Many factors affect energy intensity. For example, weather conditions, which vary among Canada's regions, affect the amount of energy used: since the Prairies are relatively cooler than southern Ontario, they use more energy for heating.

Energy intensity also depends on the age of the building, the energy source,⁴ the equipment used, the physical characteristics of the building, the floor area, the energy-saving measures in use, and so forth. Each factor affects the establishment's energy intensity independently and in its own complex way. In this study, the effect of each individual factor is not analyzed.⁵ Moreover, none of these factors can alone explain the variations among the energy intensities of the Canadian regions, as described in the following sections.

The overall energy intensity of all commercial and institutional establishments in Canada was 1.60 GJ/m² for 2004. The office sector ranked lowest, using energy at a rate of 1.23 GJ/m². At the other end of the scale, accommodation and food services sector had the highest energy intensity, consuming energy at a rate of 2.21 GJ/m². Although a subsector, non-hospital health care ranked even lower than the office sector, with an energy intensity of 0.94 GJ/m². However, the hospital subsector was the most energy intensive, all sectors and subsectors combined, consuming 2.60 GJ/m².

¹ A joule is the amount of energy required to send a one-ampere electric current through a one-ohm resistance for one second. A billion joules make one GJ. One GJ is released when one million wood matches are burned simultaneously. One GJ of energy can keep a 60-watt electric light bulb burning for six months. One GJ of energy can cook more than 2500 hamburgers on a natural gas barbecue. In 2003, an average Canadian home consumed 119.3 GJ. To convert kWh to GJ, multiply by 0.0036. To convert GJ to kWh, multiply by 277.8.

² Expressing energy use in terms of number of households involves a calculation using the energy intensity of households (GJ/household) as determined by the Office of Energy Efficiency for 2003 – the most recent year – in its Energy Use Data Handbook, June 2005. The number of households is taken from Statistic Canada's 2001 Canadian census.

³ For the purposes of the CICES, we consider only gross energy intensity, which is the total energy use divided by the total floor surface. The average intensity of each establishment, used for comparing one establishment against another, is not analyzed in this report.

⁴ For example, establishments using natural gas or heavy fuel oil are by nature more energy intensive than those that use electricity. The energy losses for these fuels are included in the CICES data, while energy losses for electricity are accounted for at the primary level and, accordingly, do not appear in this report. Canadian regions using mainly natural gas (e.g. the Prairies) will therefore tend to present higher levels of energy intensity than those using mainly electricity.

⁵ Each year the OEE publishes Energy Efficiency Trends in Canada. It describes how energy use is affected by the level of activity, weather, structure, level of service and energy efficiency. In addition, for 2000, the Commercial and Institutional Building Energy Use Survey, conducted in Canada's largest cities, gathered specific data on the energy-use characteristics of buildings. The summary report for this survey outlines its key findings. Both publications can be consulted on the Internet at oee.nrcan.gc.ca/statistics.

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