[ operations and maintenance ] BY BARBARA CARSS
FUEL-SWITCHING FORECAST Climate, cost and capacity pose fuel-switching challenges for facility owners looking to curb greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in line with Canada’s target for a 40 to 45 per cent reduction below 2005 levels by 2030. Industry panellists contemplating the electrification of mechanical systems during a recent Canada Green Building Council (CAGBC) conference in Toronto acknowledged that the leap to net zero comes with varying degrees of difficulty from region to region across the country.
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or example, B r i t i s h C o l u m b i a ’s lower mainland enjoys the twin advantages of a clean electricity grid and milder winter temperatures that generally don’t compromise the effectiveness of airsource heat pumps. Elsewhere, the arrival of new technologies and ongoing replacement of fossil-fuel-fired power generation with renewable sources are expected to ease the transition to low-carbon heating and domestic hot water systems, but that’s occurring on a patchwork of timelines. A carbon price on pace to reach $170 per tonne by 2030 and the potential for other regulatory and investmentrelated imperatives are now reshaping conventional cost-benefit analyses. Yet, even as the commercial real estate industry is urged to readjust priorities from incremental improvements with quick paybacks to big-ticket, deep retrofits, energy efficiency continues to be a preferred gateway to decarbonization for many companies pursuing emissions reduction targets. “One of the goals along with heating electrification is to reduce the amount of heat we need. It seems like now we’re talking about carbon, carbon, carbon, carbon, but energy efficiency is still very much the first thing that we focus on,” affirmed Ariel Feldman, director of sustainability with Choice Properties. “You still need to take all those steps first because, from the owner’s perspective,
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electrification is not necessarily going to pay back.You might spend more money up front and you might spend more money on the operations side.That’s not a very good business case to start from.” That said, he maintains business cases should no longer be anchored in the supposition that a boiler has a 30year life cycle. Speaking at the REMI Show in June, Jeff Ranson, director of energy, environment and advocacy with the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) of Greater Toronto, hammered home the same message. “If you’re comparing the cost of zero carbon with your current operating costs, that’s a false equivalency because your current building operations may not be possible in the future. Business as usual may not exist, and probably won’t exist,” Ranson submitted. “We’re not typically factoring in changes to the asset value whether or not your building is aligned with carbon targets. We’re not factoring carbon pricing. We’re not factoring in policy risk.” “The sticks are coming,” Steve Kemp, a principal with RDH Building Science, warned CAGBC conference attendees. INCENTIVES AND OBSTACLES FOR ELECTRIC HEAT PUMPS
In British Columbia, there’s now one such stick intertwined with a carrot. Since the release of the provincial budget on February 23, 2022, the provincial sales tax (PST) on gas-fired heating and cooling
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systems has jumped from 7 per cent to 12 per cent, while heat pumps are now exempt from PST. “To qualify, it must be a heat pump for air-conditioning and heating, where your heat pump is your primary heating and cooling system,” said Pushpinder Rana, senior director, commercial products and industry relations, with Mitsubishi Canada’s HVAC division. “Those are huge trigger points, and we are seeing similar movements across Quebec.” Kemp outlined some of the obstacles to adoption. Notably, some air-source heat pumps employing variable refrigerant flow (VRF) technology function well down to temperatures of minus 30⁰ Celsius, but, predominantly, hydronic systems “go kaput” at about minus 15⁰ C, necessitating backup boilers in areas where the temperature falls below that threshold. Because heat pumps circulate lower-temperature water — at about 49⁰ C versus 82⁰ C with boiler systems — a switchover will likely also entail replacement of space heating equipment. “Whether it’s a fan coil, baseboard convector or radiant panels, at these lower temperatures, you need a bigger physical thing to deliver the same amount of heat to that space,” Kemp advised.“We may be gutting every baseboard convector, every fan coil in the building.” Retrofitters are installing larger convectors and fan coils, multiple-row fan coils or fan-assisted baseboard convectors. However, reinforcing Feldman’s argument for prioritizing energy efficiency, Kemp also cited an example of a major retrofit where his firm derived sufficient savings from building envelope improvements to cancel out such required investments. “There, we basically cut the heating demand by 75 per cent and theoretically could have kept the same mechanical system,” he noted. “Sometimes you can get lucky.”
