ACMO Blog

Greening Condo Communities: An Ingredient for Healthy Buildings

Greening Condo Communities: An Ingredient for Healthy Buildings

While topics such as carbon footprints and “green everything” might seem like media trends or political distractions, there is merit to incorporating these topics into strategic planning for your condo building, with long-term building health in mind.

Environmental Responsibility for Condo Communities

A recent industry education session held by the Association of Condominium Managers of Ontario (ACMO) provided insights to condo managers on the economic and environmental benefits of “greening” their communities and the information and processes involved. Dean McCabe of Meritus Group Management (a member of the Tribe Management group) spoke at this session with Kevin Day of Sense Engineering and Steven Herzog of Greener Solutions. Session highlights included:

The responsibility of condominium Boards and property owners to provide utility consumption data on condominiums in Ontario and the benchmarking data that the Energy & Water Reporting and Benchmarking (EWRB) could provide to condominium communities.
How utility consumption data and corresponding benchmarks can provide performance comparisons to similar properties and industry averages
Challenges managers may experience in accessing comparative data between similar properties to assess how a condominium is performing from an energy consumption standpoint
The opportunity for Boards of Directors to highlight this data to help motivate building investments in green technology, making projects like boiler replacements, lighting updates, window retrofits and chiller modernizations more feasible and financially rewarding
The concept of Carbon Currency as a means to calculate the costs of not actively managing carbon consumption.

Changes to Energy Consumption

It was only 5-10 years ago that condos were considering the installation of natural gas generators as a means to generate electricity to reduce their reliance on the grid, or the potential for generating revenue streams from their LDC. In more recent years, the recommendation has now been to switch away from gas to electricity consumption because of attempts to reach net-zero emissions, and drastically cut methane.

With changing regulations creating a moving target for energy consumption, there appears no doubt that one method of motivating change in habits, is to use financial impact as an incentive. For example, the City of Toronto has set targets to eliminate natural gas consumption by 2040 and reduce emissions by 40% by 2030. Natural Gas costs are projected to double in the next 6 years and a portion of this increase will be through increased taxes to inspire changes in utility use habits.

Preparing Buildings for the Future

With 2030 just five years off, the general message is one of “GET OFF GAS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE”. The urgency being that this should be a priority focus when preparing reserve fund studies or having energy audits completed over the next few years. To help Boards and Management companies prioritize, three steps are highlighted below:

File your EWRB data and request from your service provider an analysis of the buildings utility performance.
Consider the benefits of a full energy audit which reviews not only the structural performance of the building but the efficiency of building systems as well.
Seek ways to curb -or eliminate - Natural Gas usage.

Healthy Buildings Managed Now, for the Future

At Meritus, and the whole Tribe Management family, we manage buildings now, for the future. We measure the health of a building in its ability to whether changes and develop a long-term strategy that supports financial and operational health, while balancing the lifestyle needs of residents.

Article Written by:

Dean McCabe, Meritus Group Management