ACA Advocates for Energy Retrofit Financing

On March 5, 2018 ACA sent a letter to Environment minister and the Municipal Affairs Minister outlining support for a new financing concept for Clean Energy program known as PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy). This is in alignment with a previous submission for energy retrofits.

In ACA’s September 20, 2016 submission to the Energy Efficiency Advisory Panel, the association acknowledged the barriers to energy efficiency investments in the commercial buildings sector. ACA has become aware of and endorses the concept of PACE programs, successfully utilized in other jurisdictions across North America.

During the previous submission ACA supported the use of funds raised by the carbon levy to GHG emissions reduction. While the work initiated by Energy Efficiency Alberta is a good first step there are improvements which could be made to assist owners and industry to make these retrofits more affordable.

ACA continues to urge the Government of Alberta to dedicate a significant portion of the carbon levies to incent building owners to undertake recommissioning and deep retrofits (that is, retrofits of building envelopes, lighting and HVAC systems) of Alberta’s building stock.

Also, the government should ensure that carbon levies for energy efficiency remain allocated for that purpose. In particular, where uptake under one program has not been as large as anticipated, funds should be reallocated to different energy efficiency initiatives such as deep retrofits.

You can read the rest of the recent letter here.