Accomplishments

New Buildings

  • The National Energy Code for Buildings (NECB) was updated. The NECB 2011 update represents the largest single-step efficiency increase in the history of the NECB.

    NRCan and many other industry stakeholders supported the update of NECB which provides an overall 25% improvement in energy efficiency over the previous 1997 Model National Energy Code for Buildings requirement. The updated code establishes the minimum requirements for energy efficiency in new buildings and major retrofits that are governed by the code. NECB 2011 will level the playing field between Canada and other Building Energy Code Leaders bringing Canada in line with other jurisdictions around the world.
  • NRCan's Validation of New Building Designs Service validated over 300 submissions with projected savings of over 1 million gigajoules. Many of these buildings subsequently received Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) New Construction building certifications.

Existing Buildings

  • Financial incentives from NRCan stimulated almost 1300 energy retrofit projects in the commercial and industrial sectors with an investment value of over $287 million. Once complete, these projects will save $45 million in annual energy costs.
  • As part of our pilot energy management benchmarking and labeling effort to motivate owners and operators into energy-saving actions, almost 400 commercial buildings received energy labels.

Federal Buildings

  • The Federal Buildings Initiative helped to leverage over $56 million in private-sector investment to assist federal facilities across Canada to implement energy efficiency retrofit projects. These projects represent projected annual savings of $6.1 million.

Training and Information Tools

NRCan provided energy management training to over 4,000 building owners, managers, operators, designers and builders, and more than 1850 participants from the building and industrial sectors.  These participants took part in webinars and other information sessions. It is estimated that the impact of this training and knowledge-sharing could represent energy savings of $9.5 million annually.