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What is the Better Buildings Ottawa Strategy?
The Better Buildings Ottawa Strategy was approved by City Council in October 2021. This strategy identifies how to encourage and support deep greenhouse gas reducing retrofits in commercial, institutional, and industrial buildings as well as large multi-unit residential buildings (MURBs). This includes all buildings in Part 3 of the Ontario Building Code, excluding those owned or operated by the City since they are dealt with under a separate Municipal Building Retrofit strategy.
The Better Buildings Ottawa Strategy is made up of several key components.
- Benchmarking and auditing
- Marketing, education, and training
- Economic tools and coordination
- Regulating disclosure, energy audits, and emissions performance
- Senior government engagement
City Council has directed the development of energy disclosure and performance bylaws. This is following a similar course of direction to Vancouver in 2019 and Toronto in 2020. The Better Buildings Ottawa Strategy will seek to prepare building operators for these regulatory changes and support them in undertaking energy efficiency measures in a cost-effective manner.
If you would like to receive updates on the Better Buildings Ottawa Strategy, subscribe to the Better Buildings e-newsletter.
Why is building energy efficiency important?
Existing buildings are the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in Ottawa. In 2020, industrial, commercial, and institutional buildings contributed 22 per cent of Ottawa’s greenhouse gas emissions. Most of these emissions are from space heating.
To meet our target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050, 95 per cent of commercial and industrial, as well as large residential buildings, must reduce energy for heating use by 70 per cent and for electricity use by 30 per cent by 2040.
An energy-efficient building is healthier to work or live in, more valuable, more resilient and reduces money spent on energy, and energy used. Building energy retrofits also create good, local, green jobs. A study by Toronto-based non-profit The Atmospheric Fund (TAF) also found that energy-efficient buildings have lower tenant turnover and vacancy rates, increased property value, and reduced insurance cost premiums.
A 2023 report by the Building Decarbonization Alliance, of which the City of Ottawa is a member, focuses on the business case for electrifying buildings. “The Case for Building Electrification in Canada” puts forward the opportunities for building owners to replace their existing fossil fuel infrastructure and equipment with electric alternatives. The full report can be found on the Building Decarbonization Alliance website.
Energy benchmarking and auditing program
- What is the Better Buildings Ottawa – Benchmarking and Auditing Program?
- What is energy benchmarking and why is it important?
- Who can participate in the Program?
- How does the Program work?
- Benefits of participation
- Public Energy Performance Map
- Energy Performance Scorecard and Insights Report
- Building Envelope Thermal Inspections
- The Government of Ontario’s Energy and Water Reporting and Benchmarking Program
Retrofit Financing Options
Deep Retrofit Financing Options
The City of Ottawa has identified several retrofit financing options available today which may serve building owners and operators looking to undertake deep energy retrofits. The City has no official ties or associations with any of these financiers.
Interactive map – Open-loop geothermal resource potential
In 2021, the City worked with J.L. Richards and Associates to perform a preliminary study of the open-loop geothermal resource potential within Ottawa.
It is important to note that this study only looked at open-loop geothermal resource potential. Most areas in Ottawa have a strong closed-loop geothermal resource potential.
The interactive map shows the open-loop geothermal resource potential within Ottawa.
More detail can be found in the Open Loop Geothermal Resource Scoping Study [ PDF 3.575 MB ]
Tips for using the interactive mapping feature:
- To view a specific address, use the search box in the upper right-hand corner of the screen
- Clicking on the +/- symbols or using the scroll button on your mouse also allows users to zoom in and out.
- To pan, click on the map and hold while moving the mouse in the desired direction.
- This application works best in the Google Chrome web browser.
Webinar series
Insights Report Webinar - With Poll Results
0:07
So everyone, my name is Marie.
0:09
I'm a project manager at the City of Ottawa's Climate Change Mitigation and Resiliency team, and I focus on supporting building owners and managers in Ottawa with their energy and decarbonization objectives by running a benchmarking program with perks.
0:24
So today we have with us Daniel Eden from Open Tech who supports that benchmarking program with the public disclosure mapping tool as well at which has some new exciting features coming out very soon that everyone will get to see.
0:38
And also that group provides us with the free insights reports for every building that participates and discloses their performance data with the City of Ottawa.
0:47
So these insights reports are provided to all better building Ottawa participants as one of the program perks.
0:54
And today we get to have a deep dive into how they're created and how they're being used.
1:00
This is our first webinar, so I'm just going to take a second and see if I can get all of my functions working.
1:05
But while I do that, Suzanne, do you mind launching the first poll just to get a sense of who's in the room?
1:12
So the question is, have you or your organization participated in better buildings Ottawa yet?
1:22
And I know not everyone here is in Ottawa has buildings in the port or portfolio to work on.
1:45
So far, that's everyone who's here has answered.
1:49
Sorry, Suzanne, I can't hear you.
1:52
Sorry, can you hear me now?
1:53
Yes, I said so far, everyone's answered now.
1:56
So that's great.
1:57
Thanks so much.
1:58
So the majority is not really our current participants in the program.
2:03
It's great to see that their interest from beyond as to how they could be implementing a solution like this.
2:09
Thanks so much.
2:09
Suzanne, you want to stop the sharing of that?
2:20
Great.
2:20
And let's see.
2:27
Can you see my presentation screen?
2:32
Thank you.
2:33
All right.
2:38
Wait, so I think we see your notes right now.
2:42
Yeah.
2:46
How about now?
2:51
Is this better?
2:53
It is still your notes.
2:58
Thanks for hanging on.
2:59
While we go through our first round, how about now?
3:20
Does it say Poll #2?
3:24
So the second question we had for the group was really for those of you who participated in the Better Buildings program in the past, have you seen your Insights report?
3:33
I'm hoping that it didn't go to the wrong person, so please let me know.
3:38
And no need to answer, not applicable.
3:40
If it's not you, great.
3:50
I'm glad that there's nobody here saying they wanted an insights report and it hasn't arrived in their inbox yet.
3:55
That's great to see.
3:56
Thanks so much, Suzanne.
3:57
We can go to our next one, which is really for those that those small few, how valuable it was.
4:09
And perhaps instead of answering a poll, you could just put some information in the chat to provide a little bit of feedback so we can keep our promise of 30 minutes or less.
4:28
So without further ado, I'd like to pass it over to Daniel, who is kind enough to, well, it's wonderful to work with Open Tech and Daniel specifically.
4:38
And thanks so much for giving us a walkthrough today of the Insights report.
4:44
You bet.
4:44
Thank you so much for having me.
4:46
Hi, everybody.
4:47
My name is Daniel Eden.
4:49
I'll be asking Marie to switch through the slides too.
4:52
So Marie, can you go to the next slide, please?
4:55
Working on it, yes.
4:57
So yeah, I mean, why?
4:59
Why am I here?
5:00
Why are you listening to me?
5:01
Well, I'm a professional engineer.
5:03
I have 10 years of experience doing engineering consulting, specifically in the green building space.
5:08
So looking at energy audits and green building certifications as well as capital planning.
5:14
I've also been an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, you know, delivering a course specifically on building energy systems.
5:22
But for the last few years, I've been working in software as the product manager for GRID.
5:27
And GRID is a tool that we've built to help deliver and support benchmarking programs and create these insight reports.
5:34
So let's go to the next slide.
5:38
So what am I going to be talking about today?
5:39
Well, I'm going to give you an overview of these scorecards or these insight reports.
5:44
I'm going to dive a little bit deeper into the methodology.
5:47
So specifically looking at you know how we're doing weather normalization, how that leads to end use breakdowns.
5:53
And finally I'm going to focus on you know the now what, what are the targets and recommendations that flow out of these.
6:00
And you know, as Marie mentioned at the beginning, we're really looking for feedback and your questions.
6:05
If anything's not clear, please feel free to add that to the chat and we'll circle back to it at the end.
6:12
Let's go to the next slide.
6:14
You know, I'll be talking a lot about energy use intensity EUI and greenhouse gas intensity GHGI.
6:20
So before we go any further, I think there's one last poll here just to see how familiar everybody is with those terms.
6:38
All right, a few more are gonna add their results here.
6:45
I think that's pretty good.
6:47
Let's see.
6:49
See the final what's happening?
6:51
It's 73% are answering yes, they know, which means 27% are Now saying that you're not familiar with that.
6:57
You can see those results.
6:59
Great.
7:01
All right, so most people are familiar with it.
7:04
But for those who aren't Marie, can you click through the next few animations here?
7:10
I mean, intensity simply means dividing the the energy use or the greenhouse gas use by the gross floor area.
7:17
So if you have two buildings like this, one small one and one big one, and they have the same energy use.
7:23
So let's reveal a few more things here.
7:29
So for example, they're both using 15,000 gigajoules of energy, but they have a very different gross floor area.
7:37
If you take the energy use and divide it by the gross floor area, you'll see that they have a very different energy use intensity.
7:42
The building on the right has actually a better energy use intensity, so it would be considered the higher performer in this case.
7:50
So let's go to the next slide.
7:53
All right, So enough of an intro, Let's get into the scorecards.
7:58
So the scorecards basically look like this.
8:02
There's three key sections.
8:03
The first one is focusing on your annual results for the, the year in question, the year that was being analyzed.
8:10
The second section looks at your monthly results.
8:14
So this is really where we kind of get into the juicy stuff.
8:17
And then the third section kind of takes all of that and says, well, now what?
8:20
What are the recommendations?
8:22
What can you do from there?
8:24
All right, let's jump into the first section, the annual results.
8:28
So the first page of your insight report looks like this.
8:33
And at the very top.
8:34
So Marie, if you can click through three times here, the very top has your basic building information.
8:42
So in there, we're seeing what kind of property type have you been classified as.
8:47
That's really important because that's the peer group that you're being compared against for the rest of these scorecards.
8:54
And we're also showing here at the top your gross floor area.
8:57
So that's also very important because we saw that the gross floor area is used to calculate the intensity metrics which are used throughout the second part of the scorecard are your highlights.
9:08
So this shows your rankings against basically the other buildings of the of your peer group for that year.
9:15
And obviously as the program grows, those insights and those rankings are going to become more and more valuable to you.
9:21
So we can see here there's fifty other office buildings and those highlights we're showing, we're kind of bubbling up what your trend is for greenhouse gas intensity.
9:31
So this building has an increase of 13% of their GHGI.
9:35
And then we could also see your rankings against the rest of the group.
9:38
So they're six out of 50th here for office buildings and 24th out of 333 for the whole cohort of buildings.
9:47
Those highlights are focusing specifically on greenhouse gas emissions because we know that greenhouse gas emissions are the main contributor to climate change.
9:58
The third part of this annual results are your year over year results, so essentially comparing your building to itself throughout the years.
10:06
So each column here is a different year in that table and each row is a different performance metric and the last column is basically showing you your trend from one year to the next.
10:17
So if we look at the 3rd row, for example the site UI, we can see that in 2021 the performance is 166.7 equivalent kilowatt hours per meter squared.
10:29
And just below that, I don't know if you can see my mouse, but just below the 167 point 66.7 we can see your percentile too.
10:37
So your percentile is showing your ranking against the rest of the the office buildings in Ottawa.
10:43
And this building is 90 in the 90th percentile and here a the 100th percentile is the best performer.
10:49
So this is a very, you know, good, performant, high performing building.
10:54
All right.
10:55
Let's go to the next slide.
11:00
You know, the second page of the scorecards are showing your annual results, but more in a visual format.
11:06
So again here each of these histograms is showing one performance metric.
11:11
So the first one here is your greenhouse gas intensity.
11:14
We can see that you're, you know, in sixth position out of 50.
11:18
That second bubble is highlighting the histogram itself.
11:21
So you know it goes from red, which is bad, to blue, which is a good performer.
11:27
So we can see here for energy use intensity, most of the buildings are kind of clustered around about 200 equivalent kilowatt hours per square foot.
11:38
And then there's a tall black bar in each of these crafts, and that is the performance of your building.
11:43
So in this case, your building is performing slightly better than the majority of buildings for energy use intensity.
11:50
And let's go to the next slide.
11:51
So that's just showing kind of where your performance is compared to the rest of the peer group, all right.
11:57
So the monthly results, this is kind of getting into the, the juicier section of the scorecards.
12:03
So Marie, if you click once through here, we'll see the top part of the scorecard is showing your monthly performance for the last three years.
12:11
If we have three years of data for your building and it's showing basically the the darker bar, it's showing this by energy type.
12:20
So on the left we have energy use intensity, sorry energy, electricity use and on the right we have thermal energy usage and thermal energy usage is combining all of the fossil fuel based energy types.
12:35
And so one thing that's important to note here is that you know if you're comparing one year of energy consumption to the next, it's not a fair comparison if the weather was different each year.
12:47
So what we've done is a weather normalization essentially trying to take weather out of the equation.
12:53
And the way we do that is for each year we compare the your energy consumption compared to the weather of that year.
13:01
And if there's a strong correlation between energy and weather, then we can use that.
13:06
We can basically pull out an equation to predict your energy based on weather.
13:11
We do that for each year and then that captures the behavior of that year and we can then plug in the 30 year average weather for each year.
13:19
So it's basically giving the same weather to each year.
13:22
Like I said, taking weather out of the equation in a sense.
13:26
If you click once again, we can see here also on the graphs we put in the average performance band.
13:33
So for this particular building, we can see for electricity, they're basically kind of in the average, maybe slightly on the lower end of the average.
13:41
And for thermal energy use the graph on the top right, we can see that this building is performing slightly better than average.
13:49
All right.
13:50
So let's click once more.
13:51
So the bottom half of this page is showing you now the energy use breakdown by energy type.
13:58
And the reason we can do that is because we found that correlation between energy consumption and outdoor weather.
14:06
And so if we look at the bottom left graph, we're looking at the electricity breakdown.
14:11
We can pull out what part of your electricity, your monthly electricity consumption is probably used for heating and what part is used for cooling and what part can be attributed to a base load, So a consistent load throughout the year.
14:26
We do that for both electricity and for therm water to use.
14:31
That's good.
14:31
You can go to the next slide.
14:33
Thanks, Marie.
14:35
So I also wanted to show you comparison, because for some of you there may not be a correlation between energies and weather that happens as well.
14:43
So let's click one more time and you'll see here on the right hand side a second scorecard where there was no correlation.
14:51
So if you click once more, we'll see here.
14:54
When there is no correlation in the title of the graph, we'll just say that we're presenting your build value, so basically your your raw utility consumption data.
15:04
And if you click once more, we'll see on the bottom.
15:07
Since we weren't able to pull out a strong enough correlation between weather and energy use, we're just showing all of your energy as the base load.
15:19
All right, so let's go to the next page.
15:22
What this energy use breakdown allows us to do is then take your greenhouse gas intensity and break that down into the end uses.
15:32
So on the graph here on the left hand side, so if you click once more we can see this is your building's performance, your greenhouse gas intensity performance for broken down by the different end uses.
15:45
On the right side of the building is the average building type.
15:49
Eventually what we want to include on this graph too is 1/3 column that would show what is the net zero energy or the net 0 consumption building and how do you compare to that as well.
16:00
And if you click once more, we'll see that, well, where do these colors come from?
16:04
They come from that energies breakdown that we did on the previous page.
16:08
So if you click through a few times, we'll see that, you know, the colors relate here.
16:12
The the teal is the teal, the blue is the blue, the orange is the orange.
16:16
And for this particular building, most of their greenhouse gas intensity comes from thermal energy heating.
16:22
And that's the case for a lot of buildings.
16:25
All right, let's go to the next slide.
16:27
Finally, we move on to the recommendation.
16:31
So what do we have here?
16:34
You'll see that we essentially take those N uses again and we compare each N use to the rest of your peer group.
16:42
So if you click through once more, so here we have your heating energy.
16:46
This combines heating energy from electricity and from thermal energy usage.
16:51
And we're showing your percentile ranking.
16:53
So 100 percentile is the best building.
16:56
This building is 86 percentile.
16:58
So it's doing very, very well.
17:01
And just below that, we also set a target.
17:04
So if you click once more, if your building is below the 75th percentile, well we're going to give you the 75th percentile as your target if your building is above the 75th percentile.
17:17
So as is the case here, we say well what if you also had a 10% improvement over that and then we show what it would be the impact of achieving that target in terms of reducing your greenhouse gas emissions.
17:29
So here there would be a reduction of 3.84 tons and also what would be your energy cost savings.
17:36
So here it's roughly $3500 per year.
17:40
And so we're trying to provide a bit of intensive here of like you know what would, what would the world look like if you did kind of achieve the the cream of the crop in terms of performance.
17:51
I think you can click through a couple more times.
17:52
So once again, I'm just showing here that you know, these results are coming from the energy use breakdown that we did at the monthly energy performance level, All right.
18:06
So the last page here is now looking at, well, what do we do with all of this information, A couple things here.
18:15
So the first one, if you click once more, we'll see that some of the scorecards, some of the insight reports actually also include thermal image scans.
18:26
So Marisa I think is going to talk a little bit more about why some buildings have this.
18:31
It's it's a pilot program that the city is running.
18:33
If you click again we'll see also for the main building archetypes, for example office buildings, multi unit residential, the City of Ottawa worked with WSP to develop retrofit Rd.
18:47
maps for those building types.
18:49
So if that's applicable, applicable for your building type, it's going to be linked here.
18:53
And finally, we also encourage everybody to, you know, register for the next year of the program.
18:58
So I think that's all I had from my end.
19:02
Obviously very open to any questions that you have.
19:06
And yeah, thank you for your attention.
19:12
So are there any questions?
19:13
Let's take a look at the chat and see if there were any specific questions on that.
19:18
Daniel, there was a question on the GHG breakdown graph.
19:22
Is the average building in Ottawa specifically or Canada?
19:26
It's an Ottawa specifically, it's looking at the average building of the same building type.
19:31
So it's looking at your peer group.
19:35
Perfect.
19:36
And the next question was on the monthly performance graphs.
19:39
Is the Gray band for the building being reported on or for all buildings in this type?
19:46
There's a great band for the building being reported on?
19:49
Oh yeah, OK.
19:50
It's for all buildings of that type.
19:52
So if you're an office building, it's showing you the average performance band for office buildings in Ottawa.
19:58
Perfect.
20:02
That's it for questions that I see right now.
20:04
There is one more, I'm sorry, in the Q&A is the data drawn from ESPM.
20:12
So the data originally comes from Energy Star Portfolio Manager and is shared with an account that the City of Ottawa has a better buildings Ottawa account and that feeds grid seed and all of this information.
20:25
So it's the exact same data that gets input into Energy Star Portfolio Manager.
20:29
That is the key data source that we're using for this analysis, Yes.
20:34
Harry Harry's next question is, so no other data sources and I'd have to think really hard to see if there are any other data sources that are being pulled in.
20:50
There are for other parts of the analysis.
20:53
But Daniel, is there anything else in order to produce the these map, these insight reports?
20:59
Rather, yeah.
21:00
The insight reports come purely of comparing the energy that's flowing from Energy Star Portfolio Manager.
21:05
So it's all of the energy data that the participants in the program are reporting.
21:11
We're not pulling any of the Canadian wide averages or anything like that.
21:15
It's all just compared to the the data that's being reported as part of the Better Buildings Auto program, right.
21:24
But Harry, some of those additional elements like the thermal imaging scan that doesn't come from Energy Star Portfolio Manager and WSP specific Architect reports on 0 carbon pathways with costing that's also a separate piece of information.
21:41
And one more question back in the chat, was there a process in place for excluding data points that were considered to be incorrect, like consumptions of 0 or unusually high consumption values, Dan?
21:54
Yeah.
21:54
So one of the features that we've built into GRID, which is the tool that helps to generate these reports is that it flags any incomplete data or it flags any unusually high or low consumption data.
22:09
And then it allows the the program manager, in this case the City of Ottawa to mark those buildings as incomplete or invalid and they don't get included in the analysis at that point.
22:21
Absolutely, yeah.
22:22
And we do find frequently actually there was just a case earlier this week of a large portfolio owner that submitted their data to us and we went through that kind of high level quality check and found that the information they were submitting and other sources was incomplete and inaccurate.
22:40
And so we were working with them to correct that so that we can have a fulsome set of accurate data in our benchmarking program.
22:51
Can you still see my slide?
22:52
Because I want it with six minutes left and I'm committed to the 30 minute mark.
22:56
And so I just wanted to be clear that the Insight reports are really just one of the many growing Perks that we're offering in our program.
23:05
I'm constantly listening to our current and potential future stakeholders to hear what would be enticing for participation in the program or what their current struggles are in terms of, you know, engaging in further action on decarbonization or access to data.
23:21
So I'm listening to that and that's how we're developing our list of perks.
23:24
So Insights report is 1.
23:26
Also, we have access to free training, so participants in our program get access to sessions like energy efficiency for building operators is one that we've run.
23:36
We ran another one of making the case for decarbonization projects.
23:40
We're going to continue running the energy efficiency for building operators.
23:44
I was such a valuable workshop and the building operators are really a key stakeholder in moving all of this forward.
23:53
And how I like to divide this sometimes is the difference between investment projects on capital and investing in in people and operational changes, getting better checklists, policies, procedures, recommissioning of buildings.
24:06
So they're in two different categories in my mind all the time.
24:09
We also are offering any current participants discounts on a number of services.
24:13
One is the thermal images.
24:15
So if your property didn't have a beautiful thermal image to give a sense of how much energy leakage there is from the building envelope, feel free to participate in the program or ask me questions about how to get access to those those discounts, standardizing information, additional training programs.
24:35
We've just launched our webinar series and are open to feedback on how, what additional topics we should have moving forward.
24:41
Retrofit financing programs is another perk.
24:44
So there's right now a call for expression of interest any building that's multi unit residential to that condos or apartments that are large.
24:53
So part three of the Part 3, but there is funding right now specifically for Ottawa, a limited time offer.
25:02
So please do throw your hat in the race, just send me an e-mail after this and I'll send you the link.
25:07
It's about 10 questions to potentially receive funding for all incremental elements of replacing your mechanical equipment and getting off of majority natural gas and having a major reduction in GHG emissions and more are being added on a regular basis.
25:23
So please feel free to let me know what else you'd like to see from the program.
25:30
If you're already participating in EWRB, then what we like to say is this is about 10 to 15 minutes of additional work for that laundry list of perks and programs as which is always growing and is here to meet your needs.
25:44
And if you're not already in EWRB participants, we can help.
25:47
Just send us an e-mail and we can help get you started on that path.
25:51
Our next webinar is planning to be on the state of building envelopes in Ottawa.
25:55
So it's going to be the high level results from the pilot project that we ran of having 191 buildings have thermal imaging scans, aerial and from from from street views.
26:07
So we'll have the results of that.
26:09
So the state of building envelopes in Ottawa.
26:11
You can register at this link and if you're missing any of that information, feel free to scan the QR code on the left.
26:19
We'll get you signed up for the Better Buildings Ottawa newsletter.
26:22
So you hear about all of the UpToDate information that we have launching or the one on the right is the general.
26:28
Send us an e-mail saying you were at this webinar and you have additional questions or e-mail better buildings at Ottawa dot CA if you don't have your smartphone handy.
26:39
And that's all we have for you today.
26:40
I'm just going to double check the chat in Q&A with two minutes to spare.
26:46
Oh, I see One more idea of a perk of the program from Houston.
26:52
Thank you so much.
26:54
I will continue to look into that.
26:56
Was there anything else in the Q&A?
27:01
No.
27:02
Suzanne, do you want to launch the last poll then to get a sense of future webinar topics?
27:15
Thanks so much Suzanne.
27:28
Ooh, looks like EV charging is of great interest, but also program perks updates.
27:36
Wonderful.
27:37
One minute to spare.
27:38
I just want to thank Daniel so much for making the time today for Suzanne for anything, everything in the background for everyone who is able to come today to a 29 minute webinar on your lunch hour or at a different time of the day.
27:51
Thanks so much.
27:52
It means a lot to me and to all of us as we continue evolving our program.
27:57
Have a great day.
28:00
Thanks so much.
28:01
Thanks, Marie.
28:02
Thanks, Suzanne.
0:07
So everyone, my name is Marie.
0:09
I'm a project manager at the City of Ottawa's Climate Change Mitigation and Resiliency team, and I focus on supporting building owners and managers in Ottawa with their energy and decarbonization objectives by running a benchmarking program with perks.
0:24
So today we have with us Daniel Eden from Open Tech who supports that benchmarking program with the public disclosure mapping tool as well at which has some new exciting features coming out very soon that everyone will get to see.
0:38
And also that group provides us with the free insights reports for every building that participates and discloses their performance data with the City of Ottawa.
0:47
So these insights reports are provided to all better building Ottawa participants as one of the program perks.
0:54
And today we get to have a deep dive into how they're created and how they're being used.
1:00
This is our first webinar, so I'm just going to take a second and see if I can get all of my functions working.
1:05
But while I do that, Suzanne, do you mind launching the first poll just to get a sense of who's in the room?
1:12
So the question is, have you or your organization participated in better buildings Ottawa yet?
1:22
And I know not everyone here is in Ottawa has buildings in the port or portfolio to work on.
1:45
So far, that's everyone who's here has answered.
1:49
Sorry, Suzanne, I can't hear you.
1:52
Sorry, can you hear me now?
1:53
Yes, I said so far, everyone's answered now.
1:56
So that's great.
1:57
Thanks so much.
1:58
So the majority is not really our current participants in the program.
2:03
It's great to see that their interest from beyond as to how they could be implementing a solution like this.
2:09
Thanks so much.
2:09
Suzanne, you want to stop the sharing of that?
2:20
Great.
2:20
And let's see.
2:27
Can you see my presentation screen?
2:32
Thank you.
2:33
All right.
2:38
Wait, so I think we see your notes right now.
2:42
Yeah.
2:46
How about now?
2:51
Is this better?
2:53
It is still your notes.
2:58
Thanks for hanging on.
2:59
While we go through our first round, how about now?
3:20
Does it say Poll #2?
3:24
So the second question we had for the group was really for those of you who participated in the Better Buildings program in the past, have you seen your Insights report?
3:33
I'm hoping that it didn't go to the wrong person, so please let me know.
3:38
And no need to answer, not applicable.
3:40
If it's not you, great.
3:50
I'm glad that there's nobody here saying they wanted an insights report and it hasn't arrived in their inbox yet.
3:55
That's great to see.
3:56
Thanks so much, Suzanne.
3:57
We can go to our next one, which is really for those that those small few, how valuable it was.
4:09
And perhaps instead of answering a poll, you could just put some information in the chat to provide a little bit of feedback so we can keep our promise of 30 minutes or less.
4:28
So without further ado, I'd like to pass it over to Daniel, who is kind enough to, well, it's wonderful to work with Open Tech and Daniel specifically.
4:38
And thanks so much for giving us a walkthrough today of the Insights report.
4:44
You bet.
4:44
Thank you so much for having me.
4:46
Hi, everybody.
4:47
My name is Daniel Eden.
4:49
I'll be asking Marie to switch through the slides too.
4:52
So Marie, can you go to the next slide, please?
4:55
Working on it, yes.
4:57
So yeah, I mean, why?
4:59
Why am I here?
5:00
Why are you listening to me?
5:01
Well, I'm a professional engineer.
5:03
I have 10 years of experience doing engineering consulting, specifically in the green building space.
5:08
So looking at energy audits and green building certifications as well as capital planning.
5:14
I've also been an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, you know, delivering a course specifically on building energy systems.
5:22
But for the last few years, I've been working in software as the product manager for GRID.
5:27
And GRID is a tool that we've built to help deliver and support benchmarking programs and create these insight reports.
5:34
So let's go to the next slide.
5:38
So what am I going to be talking about today?
5:39
Well, I'm going to give you an overview of these scorecards or these insight reports.
5:44
I'm going to dive a little bit deeper into the methodology.
5:47
So specifically looking at you know how we're doing weather normalization, how that leads to end use breakdowns.
5:53
And finally I'm going to focus on you know the now what, what are the targets and recommendations that flow out of these.
6:00
And you know, as Marie mentioned at the beginning, we're really looking for feedback and your questions.
6:05
If anything's not clear, please feel free to add that to the chat and we'll circle back to it at the end.
6:12
Let's go to the next slide.
6:14
You know, I'll be talking a lot about energy use intensity EUI and greenhouse gas intensity GHGI.
6:20
So before we go any further, I think there's one last poll here just to see how familiar everybody is with those terms.
6:38
All right, a few more are gonna add their results here.
6:45
I think that's pretty good.
6:47
Let's see.
6:49
See the final what's happening?
6:51
It's 73% are answering yes, they know, which means 27% are Now saying that you're not familiar with that.
6:57
You can see those results.
6:59
Great.
7:01
All right, so most people are familiar with it.
7:04
But for those who aren't Marie, can you click through the next few animations here?
7:10
I mean, intensity simply means dividing the the energy use or the greenhouse gas use by the gross floor area.
7:17
So if you have two buildings like this, one small one and one big one, and they have the same energy use.
7:23
So let's reveal a few more things here.
7:29
So for example, they're both using 15,000 gigajoules of energy, but they have a very different gross floor area.
7:37
If you take the energy use and divide it by the gross floor area, you'll see that they have a very different energy use intensity.
7:42
The building on the right has actually a better energy use intensity, so it would be considered the higher performer in this case.
7:50
So let's go to the next slide.
7:53
All right, So enough of an intro, Let's get into the scorecards.
7:58
So the scorecards basically look like this.
8:02
There's three key sections.
8:03
The first one is focusing on your annual results for the, the year in question, the year that was being analyzed.
8:10
The second section looks at your monthly results.
8:14
So this is really where we kind of get into the juicy stuff.
8:17
And then the third section kind of takes all of that and says, well, now what?
8:20
What are the recommendations?
8:22
What can you do from there?
8:24
All right, let's jump into the first section, the annual results.
8:28
So the first page of your insight report looks like this.
8:33
And at the very top.
8:34
So Marie, if you can click through three times here, the very top has your basic building information.
8:42
So in there, we're seeing what kind of property type have you been classified as.
8:47
That's really important because that's the peer group that you're being compared against for the rest of these scorecards.
8:54
And we're also showing here at the top your gross floor area.
8:57
So that's also very important because we saw that the gross floor area is used to calculate the intensity metrics which are used throughout the second part of the scorecard are your highlights.
9:08
So this shows your rankings against basically the other buildings of the of your peer group for that year.
9:15
And obviously as the program grows, those insights and those rankings are going to become more and more valuable to you.
9:21
So we can see here there's fifty other office buildings and those highlights we're showing, we're kind of bubbling up what your trend is for greenhouse gas intensity.
9:31
So this building has an increase of 13% of their GHGI.
9:35
And then we could also see your rankings against the rest of the group.
9:38
So they're six out of 50th here for office buildings and 24th out of 333 for the whole cohort of buildings.
9:47
Those highlights are focusing specifically on greenhouse gas emissions because we know that greenhouse gas emissions are the main contributor to climate change.
9:58
The third part of this annual results are your year over year results, so essentially comparing your building to itself throughout the years.
10:06
So each column here is a different year in that table and each row is a different performance metric and the last column is basically showing you your trend from one year to the next.
10:17
So if we look at the 3rd row, for example the site UI, we can see that in 2021 the performance is 166.7 equivalent kilowatt hours per meter squared.
10:29
And just below that, I don't know if you can see my mouse, but just below the 167 point 66.7 we can see your percentile too.
10:37
So your percentile is showing your ranking against the rest of the the office buildings in Ottawa.
10:43
And this building is 90 in the 90th percentile and here a the 100th percentile is the best performer.
10:49
So this is a very, you know, good, performant, high performing building.
10:54
All right.
10:55
Let's go to the next slide.
11:00
You know, the second page of the scorecards are showing your annual results, but more in a visual format.
11:06
So again here each of these histograms is showing one performance metric.
11:11
So the first one here is your greenhouse gas intensity.
11:14
We can see that you're, you know, in sixth position out of 50.
11:18
That second bubble is highlighting the histogram itself.
11:21
So you know it goes from red, which is bad, to blue, which is a good performer.
11:27
So we can see here for energy use intensity, most of the buildings are kind of clustered around about 200 equivalent kilowatt hours per square foot.
11:38
And then there's a tall black bar in each of these crafts, and that is the performance of your building.
11:43
So in this case, your building is performing slightly better than the majority of buildings for energy use intensity.
11:50
And let's go to the next slide.
11:51
So that's just showing kind of where your performance is compared to the rest of the peer group, all right.
11:57
So the monthly results, this is kind of getting into the, the juicier section of the scorecards.
12:03
So Marie, if you click once through here, we'll see the top part of the scorecard is showing your monthly performance for the last three years.
12:11
If we have three years of data for your building and it's showing basically the the darker bar, it's showing this by energy type.
12:20
So on the left we have energy use intensity, sorry energy, electricity use and on the right we have thermal energy usage and thermal energy usage is combining all of the fossil fuel based energy types.
12:35
And so one thing that's important to note here is that you know if you're comparing one year of energy consumption to the next, it's not a fair comparison if the weather was different each year.
12:47
So what we've done is a weather normalization essentially trying to take weather out of the equation.
12:53
And the way we do that is for each year we compare the your energy consumption compared to the weather of that year.
13:01
And if there's a strong correlation between energy and weather, then we can use that.
13:06
We can basically pull out an equation to predict your energy based on weather.
13:11
We do that for each year and then that captures the behavior of that year and we can then plug in the 30 year average weather for each year.
13:19
So it's basically giving the same weather to each year.
13:22
Like I said, taking weather out of the equation in a sense.
13:26
If you click once again, we can see here also on the graphs we put in the average performance band.
13:33
So for this particular building, we can see for electricity, they're basically kind of in the average, maybe slightly on the lower end of the average.
13:41
And for thermal energy use the graph on the top right, we can see that this building is performing slightly better than average.
13:49
All right.
13:50
So let's click once more.
13:51
So the bottom half of this page is showing you now the energy use breakdown by energy type.
13:58
And the reason we can do that is because we found that correlation between energy consumption and outdoor weather.
14:06
And so if we look at the bottom left graph, we're looking at the electricity breakdown.
14:11
We can pull out what part of your electricity, your monthly electricity consumption is probably used for heating and what part is used for cooling and what part can be attributed to a base load, So a consistent load throughout the year.
14:26
We do that for both electricity and for therm water to use.
14:31
That's good.
14:31
You can go to the next slide.
14:33
Thanks, Marie.
14:35
So I also wanted to show you comparison, because for some of you there may not be a correlation between energies and weather that happens as well.
14:43
So let's click one more time and you'll see here on the right hand side a second scorecard where there was no correlation.
14:51
So if you click once more, we'll see here.
14:54
When there is no correlation in the title of the graph, we'll just say that we're presenting your build value, so basically your your raw utility consumption data.
15:04
And if you click once more, we'll see on the bottom.
15:07
Since we weren't able to pull out a strong enough correlation between weather and energy use, we're just showing all of your energy as the base load.
15:19
All right, so let's go to the next page.
15:22
What this energy use breakdown allows us to do is then take your greenhouse gas intensity and break that down into the end uses.
15:32
So on the graph here on the left hand side, so if you click once more we can see this is your building's performance, your greenhouse gas intensity performance for broken down by the different end uses.
15:45
On the right side of the building is the average building type.
15:49
Eventually what we want to include on this graph too is 1/3 column that would show what is the net zero energy or the net 0 consumption building and how do you compare to that as well.
16:00
And if you click once more, we'll see that, well, where do these colors come from?
16:04
They come from that energies breakdown that we did on the previous page.
16:08
So if you click through a few times, we'll see that, you know, the colors relate here.
16:12
The the teal is the teal, the blue is the blue, the orange is the orange.
16:16
And for this particular building, most of their greenhouse gas intensity comes from thermal energy heating.
16:22
And that's the case for a lot of buildings.
16:25
All right, let's go to the next slide.
16:27
Finally, we move on to the recommendation.
16:31
So what do we have here?
16:34
You'll see that we essentially take those N uses again and we compare each N use to the rest of your peer group.
16:42
So if you click through once more, so here we have your heating energy.
16:46
This combines heating energy from electricity and from thermal energy usage.
16:51
And we're showing your percentile ranking.
16:53
So 100 percentile is the best building.
16:56
This building is 86 percentile.
16:58
So it's doing very, very well.
17:01
And just below that, we also set a target.
17:04
So if you click once more, if your building is below the 75th percentile, well we're going to give you the 75th percentile as your target if your building is above the 75th percentile.
17:17
So as is the case here, we say well what if you also had a 10% improvement over that and then we show what it would be the impact of achieving that target in terms of reducing your greenhouse gas emissions.
17:29
So here there would be a reduction of 3.84 tons and also what would be your energy cost savings.
17:36
So here it's roughly $3500 per year.
17:40
And so we're trying to provide a bit of intensive here of like you know what would, what would the world look like if you did kind of achieve the the cream of the crop in terms of performance.
17:51
I think you can click through a couple more times.
17:52
So once again, I'm just showing here that you know, these results are coming from the energy use breakdown that we did at the monthly energy performance level, All right.
18:06
So the last page here is now looking at, well, what do we do with all of this information, A couple things here.
18:15
So the first one, if you click once more, we'll see that some of the scorecards, some of the insight reports actually also include thermal image scans.
18:26
So Marisa I think is going to talk a little bit more about why some buildings have this.
18:31
It's it's a pilot program that the city is running.
18:33
If you click again we'll see also for the main building archetypes, for example office buildings, multi unit residential, the City of Ottawa worked with WSP to develop retrofit Rd.
18:47
maps for those building types.
18:49
So if that's applicable, applicable for your building type, it's going to be linked here.
18:53
And finally, we also encourage everybody to, you know, register for the next year of the program.
18:58
So I think that's all I had from my end.
19:02
Obviously very open to any questions that you have.
19:06
And yeah, thank you for your attention.
19:12
So are there any questions?
19:13
Let's take a look at the chat and see if there were any specific questions on that.
19:18
Daniel, there was a question on the GHG breakdown graph.
19:22
Is the average building in Ottawa specifically or Canada?
19:26
It's an Ottawa specifically, it's looking at the average building of the same building type.
19:31
So it's looking at your peer group.
19:35
Perfect.
19:36
And the next question was on the monthly performance graphs.
19:39
Is the Gray band for the building being reported on or for all buildings in this type?
19:46
There's a great band for the building being reported on?
19:49
Oh yeah, OK.
19:50
It's for all buildings of that type.
19:52
So if you're an office building, it's showing you the average performance band for office buildings in Ottawa.
19:58
Perfect.
20:02
That's it for questions that I see right now.
20:04
There is one more, I'm sorry, in the Q&A is the data drawn from ESPM.
20:12
So the data originally comes from Energy Star Portfolio Manager and is shared with an account that the City of Ottawa has a better buildings Ottawa account and that feeds grid seed and all of this information.
20:25
So it's the exact same data that gets input into Energy Star Portfolio Manager.
20:29
That is the key data source that we're using for this analysis, Yes.
20:34
Harry Harry's next question is, so no other data sources and I'd have to think really hard to see if there are any other data sources that are being pulled in.
20:50
There are for other parts of the analysis.
20:53
But Daniel, is there anything else in order to produce the these map, these insight reports?
20:59
Rather, yeah.
21:00
The insight reports come purely of comparing the energy that's flowing from Energy Star Portfolio Manager.
21:05
So it's all of the energy data that the participants in the program are reporting.
21:11
We're not pulling any of the Canadian wide averages or anything like that.
21:15
It's all just compared to the the data that's being reported as part of the Better Buildings Auto program, right.
21:24
But Harry, some of those additional elements like the thermal imaging scan that doesn't come from Energy Star Portfolio Manager and WSP specific Architect reports on 0 carbon pathways with costing that's also a separate piece of information.
21:41
And one more question back in the chat, was there a process in place for excluding data points that were considered to be incorrect, like consumptions of 0 or unusually high consumption values, Dan?
21:54
Yeah.
21:54
So one of the features that we've built into GRID, which is the tool that helps to generate these reports is that it flags any incomplete data or it flags any unusually high or low consumption data.
22:09
And then it allows the the program manager, in this case the City of Ottawa to mark those buildings as incomplete or invalid and they don't get included in the analysis at that point.
22:21
Absolutely, yeah.
22:22
And we do find frequently actually there was just a case earlier this week of a large portfolio owner that submitted their data to us and we went through that kind of high level quality check and found that the information they were submitting and other sources was incomplete and inaccurate.
22:40
And so we were working with them to correct that so that we can have a fulsome set of accurate data in our benchmarking program.
22:51
Can you still see my slide?
22:52
Because I want it with six minutes left and I'm committed to the 30 minute mark.
22:56
And so I just wanted to be clear that the Insight reports are really just one of the many growing Perks that we're offering in our program.
23:05
I'm constantly listening to our current and potential future stakeholders to hear what would be enticing for participation in the program or what their current struggles are in terms of, you know, engaging in further action on decarbonization or access to data.
23:21
So I'm listening to that and that's how we're developing our list of perks.
23:24
So Insights report is 1.
23:26
Also, we have access to free training, so participants in our program get access to sessions like energy efficiency for building operators is one that we've run.
23:36
We ran another one of making the case for decarbonization projects.
23:40
We're going to continue running the energy efficiency for building operators.
23:44
I was such a valuable workshop and the building operators are really a key stakeholder in moving all of this forward.
23:53
And how I like to divide this sometimes is the difference between investment projects on capital and investing in in people and operational changes, getting better checklists, policies, procedures, recommissioning of buildings.
24:06
So they're in two different categories in my mind all the time.
24:09
We also are offering any current participants discounts on a number of services.
24:13
One is the thermal images.
24:15
So if your property didn't have a beautiful thermal image to give a sense of how much energy leakage there is from the building envelope, feel free to participate in the program or ask me questions about how to get access to those those discounts, standardizing information, additional training programs.
24:35
We've just launched our webinar series and are open to feedback on how, what additional topics we should have moving forward.
24:41
Retrofit financing programs is another perk.
24:44
So there's right now a call for expression of interest any building that's multi unit residential to that condos or apartments that are large.
24:53
So part three of the Part 3, but there is funding right now specifically for Ottawa, a limited time offer.
25:02
So please do throw your hat in the race, just send me an e-mail after this and I'll send you the link.
25:07
It's about 10 questions to potentially receive funding for all incremental elements of replacing your mechanical equipment and getting off of majority natural gas and having a major reduction in GHG emissions and more are being added on a regular basis.
25:23
So please feel free to let me know what else you'd like to see from the program.
25:30
If you're already participating in EWRB, then what we like to say is this is about 10 to 15 minutes of additional work for that laundry list of perks and programs as which is always growing and is here to meet your needs.
25:44
And if you're not already in EWRB participants, we can help.
25:47
Just send us an e-mail and we can help get you started on that path.
25:51
Our next webinar is planning to be on the state of building envelopes in Ottawa.
25:55
So it's going to be the high level results from the pilot project that we ran of having 191 buildings have thermal imaging scans, aerial and from from from street views.
26:07
So we'll have the results of that.
26:09
So the state of building envelopes in Ottawa.
26:11
You can register at this link and if you're missing any of that information, feel free to scan the QR code on the left.
26:19
We'll get you signed up for the Better Buildings Ottawa newsletter.
26:22
So you hear about all of the UpToDate information that we have launching or the one on the right is the general.
26:28
Send us an e-mail saying you were at this webinar and you have additional questions or e-mail better buildings at Ottawa dot CA if you don't have your smartphone handy.
26:39
And that's all we have for you today.
26:40
I'm just going to double check the chat in Q&A with two minutes to spare.
26:46
Oh, I see One more idea of a perk of the program from Houston.
26:52
Thank you so much.
26:54
I will continue to look into that.
26:56
Was there anything else in the Q&A?
27:01
No.
27:02
Suzanne, do you want to launch the last poll then to get a sense of future webinar topics?
27:15
Thanks so much Suzanne.
27:28
Ooh, looks like EV charging is of great interest, but also program perks updates.
27:36
Wonderful.
27:37
One minute to spare.
27:38
I just want to thank Daniel so much for making the time today for Suzanne for anything, everything in the background for everyone who is able to come today to a 29 minute webinar on your lunch hour or at a different time of the day.
27:51
Thanks so much.
27:52
It means a lot to me and to all of us as we continue evolving our program.
27:57
Have a great day.
28:00
Thanks so much.
28:01
Thanks, Marie.
28:02
Thanks, Suzanne.