Ask the Expert – Hemant Grover

CAGBC’s Ask the Expert continues to feature winners of the 2024 CAGBC Awards this fall with the Region of Peel’s Office of Climate Change and Energy Management, winner of the Government Leadership award. The region was recognized for enabling zero carbon growth and setting a precedent for other municipalities through its development and implementation of a corporate net zero energy building policy and standard for new construction. In this interview with Hemant Grover, Manager at the Office of Climate Change and Energy Management of the Region of Peel, we learn more about the municipality’s efforts to build climate resilient communities.

The region of Peel’s three-layer climate change master plan was developed to lead, influence and transform. Could you tell me a little bit about how buildings contribute to that plan?

That’s a great question. When we look at our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventory buildings account for roughly 40 percent of our corporate GHG emissions in terms of active operational emissions. Given that we have a significant portion of our building assets that are aging, the opportunity is ripe and ready for us to retrofit those buildings to a good state of repair while introducing low-carbon technologies, bringing in new assets and significantly reducing GHG emissions. In addition, we’re constructing a lot of new zero-carbon buildings. This allows us to grow without increasing our GHG inventory. Low-carbon and climate-resilient buildings play a significant role in achieving outcomes mandated in the climate change master plan. There are three layers to our master plan: lead, influence, and transform. The lead aspect consists of leading the charge on climate change by ensuring that we have a strong foundation to shift towards a low-carbon infrastructure for the future, and ensuring no new emissions come from our corporate buildings. As for influence, we’ve embedded low-carbon technologies into our 100-year capital plan through an energy-emissions management plan, so we’re able to influence the way we run and operate these buildings, and transform policy and processes. We’re also working on a net-zero emission building retrofit standard, which will focus on the buildings that we currently have in stock and we’re able to transform the policy through capital planning. The standard will provide the technical requirements on what needs to go into those assets, and this is how the transform aspect can be achieved our buildings. that have emissions related.

Your team played an important role in creating the region of Peel’s net-zero emission for new construction policy and standard. Could you share a little bit about the motivation behind the tool?

Yes, my team led the development of that standard, but this mostly originated from client asks. The region of Peel has seen significant growth in population, businesses and GDP and to be able to meet this growth, the region of Peel as a corporation needs to grow proportionately. As part of that growth, we also obviously need to add more buildings, more infrastructure. So, we had in our project outlook a pipeline of new construction buildings and we saw that as the perfect low- carbon, low-hanging fruit opportunity to implement low-carbon technologies The motivation was primarily the region’s commitment to long term climate action; we started at a policy level and that declared our commitment to ensuring all new corporate buildings need be part of the region’s low carbon future plans, hence a policy that ensures all new builds have a zero-carbon performance. This enabled us to set net-zero emission requirements that align with an existing national standard, CAGBC’s Zero Carbon Building (ZCB) Standard. Choosing this national standard made collaboration between contractors and consultants easier.

You mentioned the CAGBC’s ZCB-Design Standard, that your net-zero emission standard requires all your institutional new builds to follow. What were your first impressions on version 4, released at the Building Lasting Change conference this summer?

While the region standard has a number of these stringent requirements, we have the luxury to be able to afford to do so. Because we have a very limited scope and boundary. CAGBC needs to cater for a number of building archetypes across the country through various building operators in different climate zones. I see that between version 3 and 4, they’ve raised the bar, but they’re raising it slightly higher and enables the market to catch up and, have an affordable way to build to zero carbon. When comparing version 4 and 3, what stands out is embodied carbon with a slightly stricter requirement.. Requirements to lower embodied carbon are really helpful, but another crucial update in version 4 is obviously raising the bar slightly for on-site combustion, especially for space heating and hot water systems. I was happy to see additional aspects such as limiting refrigerants as well as good grid citizenship because we all know everyone is switching from natural gas to electricity, but the grid needs to be able to maintain energy availability. So good grid citizenship is, is key. I look forward to seeing further additions in the future.

A video of the full interview will be available on demand soon, so stay tuned.