A new report suggests that Canada will not achieve its greenhouse gas reduction targets without creating a plan to retrofit millions of residential and commercial buildings.

The report, which was prepared by Efficiency Canada, a policy advocacy and research organization at Carleton University in Ottawa, further suggests that at the current pace of progress, it will take more than 140 years to retrofit all low-rise residential buildings and 71 years to retrofit all commercial floor area.

Current policies are focused on short-term results, and markets are segmented and uncoordinated. A broader climate-retrofit missions, as described by the report authors, would help to trigger economies of scale and learning in building retrofits to reduce costs, increase speed and enhance value.

“To meet climate goals we need to see increases in scale and decreases in cost for building retrofits that are similar to what we have seen in wind, solar, and battery technologies. A mission-oriented approach focused on transforming the retrofit process can accomplish this,” says author Brendan Haley.

The report, titled Canada’s Climate Retrofit Mission, envisions Canada undertaking a mass retrofit of all buildings within a generation to eliminate fossil fuels, while also freeing up enough clean electricity resources to power 10 million electric vehicles. It suggests that the cost to adopt such an approach would be in the order of $580 billion to $972 billion—funds that should be amortized over 15 or even 30 years.

“These are significant capital expenditures,” it says, “but they are of the same order of magnitude as the $80 billion Canadians spend annually on building renovation or the $57 billion spent on fuel and electricity.”

The report offers a number of scenarios that show how a comprehensive national retrofit program can enable electrification and decarbonization in other sectors. A retrofit strategy that includes the replacement of fossil fuel heating with electric heat pumps, for example, can create net annual electricity savings of 50 TWh. The clean electricity freed up by building retrofits could reduce the equivalent of 60 megatonnes of CO2 per year if used to power 10 million electric vehicles.

“The potential for buildings to enable emission reductions in other sectors reinforces the rationale for undertaking comprehensive building retrofits at large scale and as rapidly as possible,” says the report. “Yet, this level of retrofit performance is far from what is being achieved under current market structures and policy environments.”

Where the report proposes retrofitting between 5 percent and 12 percent of Canada’s building stock annually, the actual pace is far slower. Current rates are below 1 percent for low-rise residential buildings and 1.4 percent of commercial building floor area, with retrofits achieving shallow rather than deep energy savings.

“To achieve better results, we need to transform the way we deliver building retrofits,” the report says.

Featured image: an energiesprong retrofit in the Netherlands. (Efficiency Canada)