By Lauren McKeon A changing climate and rising heating costs make Northerners perfect candidates to lead the energy-efficiency crusade. But as building codes go green, is the industry lagging behind?
As far as first impressions go, Dwayne Wohlgemuth is not exactly the type of guy you’d expect to build a house. Tall and slim, the 29-year-old Yellowknifer has a bookish, crisp-shirt-tucked-into-too-high-pants kind of feel. He oozes shy nice guy, but when he opens his mouth, you realize he can talk nuts and bolts with the best of ’em. And, he has, too. The former Alberta farm boy spent much of last year grilling family, friends, colleagues, designers, suppliers, contractors and construction-store workers on how to make the best environmentally friendly house possible. “I wanted to make it a learning experience,” he says. “I may never drywall another house, but now I know how.”
The house’s design may not be impressive from the outside – “It’s kind of a box, really,” he says – but there’s little question Wohlgemuth has succeeded in building something special. After three sweat-soaked months of construction, the $130,000 project (plus $120,000 for the lot) is set to outdo the EnerGuide for Homes 80 (EGH-80) rating by five points, plus achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) accreditation. And that’s only the tip of it. Among many other things, the house has a rooftop greenhouse supplied by water recycled from shower, dishes and laundry use; composting toilets; good air quality; and ground irrigation. All this has garnered enough notice from fellow greenies that Wohlgemuth is pondering the viability of building and selling sustainable houses in the North: “I think it would fly.”
Now, here’s where smart Northern developers should take notice, because Wohlgemuth’s house is more than just a tree hugger’s dream: It’s a missed opportunity. Steadily increasing fuel prices have significantly boosted demand for energy efficient homes in all three territories. In the past few years, do-it-yourself homeowners, like Wohlgemuth, have begun picking up hammers at about the same pace as bureaucratic pens have been etching green building standards into code. At the same time, too few developers and builders are biting. Too bad, considering many believe Northern industry can, and should, lead the way in sustainable building – providing they quit dragging their heels in the snow.
Just ask Bill Semple. When Semple attended the 2009 Greenbuild conference in November he was surprised to find he had little to learn from the other 28,000 attendees. Semple, a seniorresearch analyst for Northern markets with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), felt the North was way ahead of its southern counterparts in terms of building innovation. “[In the North], the crisis of energy cost and the crisis of climate change are already upon us,” he says. “We seem to be pushing things much farther and much faster.” As an example, he points to the Northern Sustainable Housing Project, a joint effort between the CMHC and the NWT Housing Corporation to build a highly efficient duplex in Inuvik. If successful, the duplex (which was designed in-house) will become the model for all future public housing built by the Housing Corp.
That’s a potentially huge impact. “We deliver between 50 and 70 buildings a year,” says Scott Reid, director of infrastructure services with the Housing Corp. “If this design works, we would look at incorporating it in all our houses, from single family dwellings, to our four-plexes, to our eight-plexes to our duplexes.” And here’s a key point: When Semple’s talking about current advances in Northern innovation, he’s talking government. Where Northern industry hasn’t led the push forward, Northern government has charged.
In the NWT, the real crusade started in 2008, when the NWT Housing Corporation pledged to build all of its houses to R-2000 standards. That’s roughly equivalent to EnerGuide 80, the green goal on the federal government’s EnerGuide energy efficiency rating program. For many, achieving an EGH-80 standard would be counted as a battle won, but not for Reid. R-2000 “is our minimum,” he says, “but that’s not our goal.” The Inuvik duplex will have to meet EGH-85 and, so far, it looks like it will do even better. In December, preliminary testing on the 99-per-cent-complete design indicated EGH-86 was achievable. And that’s without solar, says Reid. With solar, the project could leap to an impressive EGH-88.
Construction on the duplex should be complete by August or September of 2010. From there, the housing corporation will monitor the building for 18 months to see how it’s performing and if it’s worth it – both cost- and energy-wise – to build more, both in Inuvik and other communities. While the monitoring is a needed exercise in checks and responsibility, it doesn’t really seem like anyone expects the project to fail. “Definitely this is where we see the Housing Corp. going in the future,” says Reid. “Absolutely.”
Meaning, pretty soon contractors will have no choice but to go green if they want lucrative government contracts. Both the Nunavut Housing Corporation and the Yukon Housing Corporation have also integrated similar green standards into their homes. The Yukon’s SuperGreen policy has made big headway. Workers hired by the Housing Corp. recently finished two staff houses in Watson Lake built to the new code, which requires an EGH rating of 85 or higher. The houses were the territory’s first, but there are plenty more on the way. Allyn Lyon, director of community and industry partnering, estimates another 65 SuperGreen units are under construction and that number could reach 100 by the end of 2010. For Lyon, the rapid rise is about meeting demand: “Consumers are wanting it.”
To keep pace, municipal governments are also moving to ensure homes outside the Housing Corp.’s scope are shrinking their carbon footprint. In Iqaluit, selected residential lots in the capital city’s most recent subdivision are required to meet R-2000 codes, says Michele Bertol, the city’s senior director of planning and lands. It’s not much (fewer than a third of the homes will be R-2000), but it’s a start.
Whitehorse has gone further (perhaps unsurprisingly), requiring all new homes, commercial and industrial buildings to be built to EGH-80 as of Sept. 1, 2009. All new manufactured homes will have to be EGH-80 by June 30 of this year. Yellowknife implemented similar changes, first proposing EGH-80 standards for all homes (including those manufactured elsewhere and shipped into the city) in 2007. The motion passed in council in 2008, and after a soft phasing-in process, which requires houses to build to the new code in theory, developers will be required to pass physical tests starting in 2011 to show all new homes are EGH80.
The move hasn’t been very popular. When Yellowknife first proposed the changes the city encountered fierce opposition, with many manufactured-home agents and some builders saying the standards would “eliminate” their business from the market. For some, time hasn’t caused a cooling off. One local developer told The Yellowknifer in early 2009, “[EGH-80] is going to cost us so much money to achieve and it’s hardly worth it.” Another said, “Because of our costs, we aren’t competitive with the existing homes anymore … [Meeting EGH-80] is an extra $10,000 on our houses for nothing.”
Semple is hopeful contractors will come around and “as they go along they’ll realize that it’s possible and it’s not as onerous as they might have expected at first.” Already, there are a few builder-made EGH-80 homes popping up in Yellowknife and one manufacturer, Klassen Homes in Enterprise, has started to ship EGH-80 models to buyers across the territory.
Some Yellowknife builders are now embracing the new system. Niels Konge, owner of Konge Construction Ltd., fought “hard” against the original suggestion that all renovations must also be EGH-80, feeling it was unrealistic and much too costly. But that was his only beef: Konge thinks EGH-80 is a great idea for new homes. “On new buildings it’s very achievable,” he says. His company is in the process of completing its first EGH-80 home, which will go in the city’s new Niven Lake development. “It makes sense to build homes that are efficient, especially with fuel costs and energy costs going up in price,” Konge says, “The more efficient you can be every day the cheaper your cost of living actually is.”
That goes for businesses too. Fred Behrens, Nishi Khon Freeway and Forestry general manager, thinks it just makes plain good sense to build the company’s new NWT offices in Gameti, Whati and Behchoko with energy efficiency in mind. The company’s forestry crews in Gameti and Whati need access to water and landing space for helicopters, which means the new offices are planned a fair distance away from local power grids and communication lines. “Instead of paying umpteen thousands of dollars [to put in] power poles for a summer operation we went with solar and wind power,” says Behrens. “It will definitely save us money.”
It will go toward offsetting the company’s carbon consumption, too. “We do have a fairly large carbon imprint,” admits Behrens. “I’ve got 19 pieces of equipment and during the year most of them are running. We go through a heck of a lot of fuel.”
The office in Behchoko is now up and running on combined windmill and solar power thanks to Ventek Enterprises, a local Dogrib electrical company and distributor of green technology.
Only a few months into the system, Behrens is happy with the performance. While he still needs to turn the back-up generator on every few days, it’s a feat that the system works at all. “All the studies show we don’t have enough wind to really make a difference,” says Behrens. But, in a just-do-it attitude some Northerners seem to have forgotten, Behrens wanted to try it anyway. “It was kind of an experimental thing to see if it would work for us here.”
Behrens can’t yet estimate how much money the new set-up will save, or how much he’s shrinking his carbon footprint, but Nishi Khon’s experience is one more example of green technologies at work in the North that others in the industry – those who may be timid of dipping their toes into the new world – may wish to follow.
There’s green, and there’s green-washing Beware the charlatan who throws around LEED terminology
When it comes to green standards among commercial and industrial buildings, LEED reigns. Known in full, but less commonly, as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, the accreditation is becoming the gold-star standard for green building. Yet, while Ontario has 79 LEED certified buildings and B.C. has 51 (heck, even Alberta has 33), there’s only one in the North: the federal Greenstone building in Yellowknife.
So what gives? While LEED has many cheerleaders (including the Yukon government), the process to achieve full certification, which comes in four levels up to platinum, is still pricey. To complete certification for a 5,000 square-foot building in the North it costs about $5,500 in fees – and the price only rises as the building’s size goes up. Plus, it can take time, especially if further revisions are needed. The New Joamie Elementary School in Iqaluit registered in 2004 but has yet to be certified.
Considering this, it’s not surprising to learn that the dozen or so buildings throughout the three territories claiming to be LEED certified are actually just LEED registered. Essentially, this means the building’s owners have declared they’ll try for the prestigious rating, but haven’t actually gone through the rigorous checklist to attain it. The North is not unique in jumpstarting the LEED label: In Canada there are about 190 LEED certified projects, but more than 1,500 projects registered.
Depending on how you look at it, this is both good and bad. While intent is currently outstripping actual results, the massive number of registered projects shows the industry is increasingly embracing LEED. Take, for example, FSC Architects & Engineers. To meet demand for green design, the company’s Whitehorse office has grown to include eight LEED-accredited staff over the past few months. “It’s a feather in our cap,” says John Berg, one of FSC’s LEED-accredited architects. Not only does LEED align with the company’s long-held sustainable-design philosophy, having certified staff allows FSC to attract government tenders (which, thanks to a recent shift in policy, all include a LEED component). Plus, adds Berg, LEED is not just about lower impact design, it’s about forward thinking: making offices enjoyable places to be.
Even so, there’s also a warning sign in the LEED craze. Until a project is rated as part of the certification process, there’s no way of knowing how efficient it actually is – and simply saying it’s LEED isn’t enough anymore. (Indeed, the U.S. is having problems with developers claiming projects as LEED certified before they’re even built.) “The problem is that the lower levels of the rating systems are not significant improvements over what we have now,” says Bill Semple, a senior research analyst with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. “It gives the impression that the improvements are greater than they actually are.” Making it important to do your research.
As far as first impressions go, Dwayne Wohlgemuth is not exactly the type of guy you’d expect to build a house. Tall and slim, the 29-year-old Yellowknifer has a bookish, crisp-shirt-tucked-into-too-high-pants kind of feel. He oozes shy nice guy, but when he opens his mouth, you realize he can talk nuts and bolts with the best of ’em. And, he has, too. The former Alberta farm boy spent much of last year grilling family, friends, colleagues, designers, suppliers, contractors and construction-store workers on how to make the best environmentally friendly house possible. “I wanted to make it a learning experience,” he says. “I may never drywall another house, but now I know how.”
The house’s design may not be impressive from the outside – “It’s kind of a box, really,” he says – but there’s little question Wohlgemuth has succeeded in building something special. After three sweat-soaked months of construction, the $130,000 project (plus $120,000 for the lot) is set to outdo the EnerGuide for Homes 80 (EGH-80) rating by five points, plus achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) accreditation. And that’s only the tip of it. Among many other things, the house has a rooftop greenhouse supplied by water recycled from shower, dishes and laundry use; composting toilets; good air quality; and ground irrigation. All this has garnered enough notice from fellow greenies that Wohlgemuth is pondering the viability of building and selling sustainable houses in the North: “I think it would fly.”
Now, here’s where smart Northern developers should take notice, because Wohlgemuth’s house is more than just a tree hugger’s dream: It’s a missed opportunity. Steadily increasing fuel prices have significantly boosted demand for energy efficient homes in all three territories. In the past few years, do-it-yourself homeowners, like Wohlgemuth, have begun picking up hammers at about the same pace as bureaucratic pens have been etching green building standards into code. At the same time, too few developers and builders are biting. Too bad, considering many believe Northern industry can, and should, lead the way in sustainable building – providing they quit dragging their heels in the snow.
Just ask Bill Semple. When Semple attended the 2009 Greenbuild conference in November he was surprised to find he had little to learn from the other 28,000 attendees. Semple, a seniorresearch analyst for Northern markets with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), felt the North was way ahead of its southern counterparts in terms of building innovation. “[In the North], the crisis of energy cost and the crisis of climate change are already upon us,” he says. “We seem to be pushing things much farther and much faster.” As an example, he points to the Northern Sustainable Housing Project, a joint effort between the CMHC and the NWT Housing Corporation to build a highly efficient duplex in Inuvik. If successful, the duplex (which was designed in-house) will become the model for all future public housing built by the Housing Corp.
That’s a potentially huge impact. “We deliver between 50 and 70 buildings a year,” says Scott Reid, director of infrastructure services with the Housing Corp. “If this design works, we would look at incorporating it in all our houses, from single family dwellings, to our four-plexes, to our eight-plexes to our duplexes.” And here’s a key point: When Semple’s talking about current advances in Northern innovation, he’s talking government. Where Northern industry hasn’t led the push forward, Northern government has charged.
In the NWT, the real crusade started in 2008, when the NWT Housing Corporation pledged to build all of its houses to R-2000 standards. That’s roughly equivalent to EnerGuide 80, the green goal on the federal government’s EnerGuide energy efficiency rating program. For many, achieving an EGH-80 standard would be counted as a battle won, but not for Reid. R-2000 “is our minimum,” he says, “but that’s not our goal.” The Inuvik duplex will have to meet EGH-85 and, so far, it looks like it will do even better. In December, preliminary testing on the 99-per-cent-complete design indicated EGH-86 was achievable. And that’s without solar, says Reid. With solar, the project could leap to an impressive EGH-88.
Construction on the duplex should be complete by August or September of 2010. From there, the housing corporation will monitor the building for 18 months to see how it’s performing and if it’s worth it – both cost- and energy-wise – to build more, both in Inuvik and other communities. While the monitoring is a needed exercise in checks and responsibility, it doesn’t really seem like anyone expects the project to fail. “Definitely this is where we see the Housing Corp. going in the future,” says Reid. “Absolutely.”
Meaning, pretty soon contractors will have no choice but to go green if they want lucrative government contracts. Both the Nunavut Housing Corporation and the Yukon Housing Corporation have also integrated similar green standards into their homes. The Yukon’s SuperGreen policy has made big headway. Workers hired by the Housing Corp. recently finished two staff houses in Watson Lake built to the new code, which requires an EGH rating of 85 or higher. The houses were the territory’s first, but there are plenty more on the way. Allyn Lyon, director of community and industry partnering, estimates another 65 SuperGreen units are under construction and that number could reach 100 by the end of 2010. For Lyon, the rapid rise is about meeting demand: “Consumers are wanting it.”
To keep pace, municipal governments are also moving to ensure homes outside the Housing Corp.’s scope are shrinking their carbon footprint. In Iqaluit, selected residential lots in the capital city’s most recent subdivision are required to meet R-2000 codes, says Michele Bertol, the city’s senior director of planning and lands. It’s not much (fewer than a third of the homes will be R-2000), but it’s a start.
Whitehorse has gone further (perhaps unsurprisingly), requiring all new homes, commercial and industrial buildings to be built to EGH-80 as of Sept. 1, 2009. All new manufactured homes will have to be EGH-80 by June 30 of this year. Yellowknife implemented similar changes, first proposing EGH-80 standards for all homes (including those manufactured elsewhere and shipped into the city) in 2007. The motion passed in council in 2008, and after a soft phasing-in process, which requires houses to build to the new code in theory, developers will be required to pass physical tests starting in 2011 to show all new homes are EGH80.
The move hasn’t been very popular. When Yellowknife first proposed the changes the city encountered fierce opposition, with many manufactured-home agents and some builders saying the standards would “eliminate” their business from the market. For some, time hasn’t caused a cooling off. One local developer told The Yellowknifer in early 2009, “[EGH-80] is going to cost us so much money to achieve and it’s hardly worth it.” Another said, “Because of our costs, we aren’t competitive with the existing homes anymore … [Meeting EGH-80] is an extra $10,000 on our houses for nothing.”
Semple is hopeful contractors will come around and “as they go along they’ll realize that it’s possible and it’s not as onerous as they might have expected at first.” Already, there are a few builder-made EGH-80 homes popping up in Yellowknife and one manufacturer, Klassen Homes in Enterprise, has started to ship EGH-80 models to buyers across the territory.
Some Yellowknife builders are now embracing the new system. Niels Konge, owner of Konge Construction Ltd., fought “hard” against the original suggestion that all renovations must also be EGH-80, feeling it was unrealistic and much too costly. But that was his only beef: Konge thinks EGH-80 is a great idea for new homes. “On new buildings it’s very achievable,” he says. His company is in the process of completing its first EGH-80 home, which will go in the city’s new Niven Lake development. “It makes sense to build homes that are efficient, especially with fuel costs and energy costs going up in price,” Konge says, “The more efficient you can be every day the cheaper your cost of living actually is.”
That goes for businesses too. Fred Behrens, Nishi Khon Freeway and Forestry general manager, thinks it just makes plain good sense to build the company’s new NWT offices in Gameti, Whati and Behchoko with energy efficiency in mind. The company’s forestry crews in Gameti and Whati need access to water and landing space for helicopters, which means the new offices are planned a fair distance away from local power grids and communication lines. “Instead of paying umpteen thousands of dollars [to put in] power poles for a summer operation we went with solar and wind power,” says Behrens. “It will definitely save us money.”
It will go toward offsetting the company’s carbon consumption, too. “We do have a fairly large carbon imprint,” admits Behrens. “I’ve got 19 pieces of equipment and during the year most of them are running. We go through a heck of a lot of fuel.”
The office in Behchoko is now up and running on combined windmill and solar power thanks to Ventek Enterprises, a local Dogrib electrical company and distributor of green technology.
Only a few months into the system, Behrens is happy with the performance. While he still needs to turn the back-up generator on every few days, it’s a feat that the system works at all. “All the studies show we don’t have enough wind to really make a difference,” says Behrens. But, in a just-do-it attitude some Northerners seem to have forgotten, Behrens wanted to try it anyway. “It was kind of an experimental thing to see if it would work for us here.”
Behrens can’t yet estimate how much money the new set-up will save, or how much he’s shrinking his carbon footprint, but Nishi Khon’s experience is one more example of green technologies at work in the North that others in the industry – those who may be timid of dipping their toes into the new world – may wish to follow.
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Dos and don'ts of selling green
Contractors need to know how to pitch green buildings to sometimes-wary customers.
DO Pitch monthly operational savings. The Yukon Housing Corporation has found that monthly operational savings on their green houses are greater than the increase in their monthly mortgage payments. More and more people are using this selling point, with great success.
DON’T Pitch savings by number of years. Telling a potential buyer, or builder, they’ll recoup higher capital costs in eight or nine years “is a bit too nebulous and a bit too out there,” says Bill Semple, senior research analyst with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. This tactic been used over the past few years and it’s not working. “Marketing and financing and has not been done in a way that people can relate to easily,” says Semple.
DO Emphasize it will shrink the buyer’s carbon footprint. “With the lower emissions and the lower heat cost, [the house] has a positive impact on our carbon footprint for sure,” says Scott Reid, director of infrastructure services with the NWT Housing Corporation.
DO Remind a potential buyer to look at their current utilities bill.
