SSRIA Programs support our mission of accelerating the adoption of innovative low carbon solutions through demonstration project funding and supporting the growth of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Use the search function to learn more about each of these demonstration project.
In addition, SSRIA gathered quantitative data of all projects in this report and commissioned a study to gather and assess the qualitative data which is can be found the in the Green Building Technology Network Summary Report and Recommendations This extensive report provides important information on the opportunities and challenges to continue to scale innovation and decarbonization in the built environment. From this report, additional guidance documents were developed for Industry and Government.
Funding opportunities to demonstrate innovative solutions that reduce carbon in residential, commercial, and institutional buildings.
The Eco Positive Home project demonstrates energy system solution with onsite generation combined with seasonal and daily thermal storage that overcomes issues with heat pump operation in cold temperatures while maintaining a small but high utilization connection to the grid. The water conservation elements will reduce water consumption by 50%.
The primary objective is to develop, validate, prove, and then deploy the energy and water solutions across a range of scales. This will include the development of packaged systems and solutions which may then be deployed by mechanical and plumbing contractors across Canada and abroad.
The energy systems solution is intended to generate a negative utility and effectively negative carbon due to the displaced carbon from the home and the two EVs it powers. Further benefits include grid stabilization and addressing peak demand issues at the distribution level of the grid through thermal storage and load shifting.
A lower life cycle cost system with multiple redundant low carbon energy sources will provide climate resiliency and community resiliency due to grid impacts and larger scale deployments that will be unlocked by this proof of concept.
The project innovation is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Site built retrofits are relatively straightforward. You build to what’s there and solve the problems you encounter as you go.
Panelized solutions take a lot of expensive upfront work. This project is innovative in that it builds on the project team’s experience to take advantage of the benefits of both.
The project reduces greenhouse gas emissions by making the wall upgrade portion of the deep energy retrofits more affordable and more likely to happen. It does this be reducing costs below what is currently done.
A range of techniques for upgrading exterior wall insulation have been and are being tried: site installed rigid insulation, both mineral fiber and foam sheets with furring of some kind to attached siding, stick built 2×4 walls supported at grade on treated boxes, site made Larson trusses, I joists, and a couple of panelized solutions. All of these options are expensive and require substantial on site labour.
For the site built techniques, the existing cladding usually needs to be removed and disposed of and there is considerable skilled labour required to cut, fit and install the materials. Panelization requires exacting measurement of the existing building (usually digital) and careful translation of those measurements to panel drawings in order to ensure a good fit. There is also the need for the precise installation of some kind of support bracket, a facility big enough to fabricate the wall panels, trucking to transport them and a crane to install them.
The hybrid component based approach addresses some of these obstacles to reduce cost and complexity as follows:
– Much reduced demolition labour and disposal volume.
– Simple prefabricated components that can be made almost anywhere and that can be transported and installed with minimal equipment. -Components that will reduce installation time over all, especially finicky work from scaffolding.
– Components that can be installed quickly by entry level and lower skilled workers.
– Standardize the treatments for as many of the junctions, utility and service penetrations and building conditions as we can to reduce the labour and thinking required to maintain insulation continuity, improve water resistance and increased air tightness.
– Formalize installation and completion procedures that improve efficiency.
– Uses material efficiently.
In the final phase, the project team tests the idea of simple panel like modules. The expansion potential is enormous but will depend on the size of the market for deep retrofits in Canada and the northern US. That market is dependent mostly on cost and affordability. The project team is confident they can reduce the cost of the wall component of deep retrofits but they won’t know by how much until we test and refine it.
This project adapts the Energiesprong panelized retrofit technique brought to Canada by Peter Amerongen (ReNu Engineering and Retrofit Canada). The prefabricated panelized retrofits use natural, low embodied carbon wood fiber insulation in order to increase efficiency of production. Demonstrating these innovative panels on different types of buildings (1 fourplex and 1 single family dwelling) will not only impact these buildings but also contribute to the larger aggregation of panelized retrofit projects, further de-risking and facilitating its uptake.
Wood fiber, a high performing insulator and carbon sequestering material, is often deemed too costly for residential retrofits, as is exterior insulation more broadly. The project targets barriers such as high costs, low awareness of bio-based materials, and limited industry training, which hinder the adoption of exterior insulation/retrofits and deter building owners. The project will employ prefabrication to enhance the use of wood fiber insulation, promoting a shift away from synthetic materials. Prefabrication reduces waste and site variables, maximizing efficiency and reducing costs.
By integrating innovative prefabrication methods with wood fiber insulation for panelized retrofits, the project aims to lower embodied and operational GHG emissions beyond what is achievable with current practices. By retrofitting existing structures with exterior insulation, energy consumption for heating and cooling decrease and operational emissions decrease significantly. The use of wood-fiber insulation minimizes the embodied carbon associated with insulation, especially compared to typical exterior insulation materials like EPS.
These two demonstration projects (1 fourplex and 1 single family dwelling) will be monitored and their performance catalogued along with the production and installation process in a case study, leveraging the expertise and networks of our project team to ensure objectives are met and resulting knowledge is shared widely.
This project demonstrates an all-electric combined HVAC and domestic hot water system using a single heat pump for both new and existing multi-unit residential buildings, which provides low operational and embodied carbon at a lower cost than competing all-electric solutions.
The project comprises two innovative elements:
– a single heat pump integrated with a ventilation system to provide the entire building’s heating, cooling, DHW, and ventilation needs
– cold air distribution (CAD), which uses very low temperatures to increase the cooling capacity of the air delivered to indoor spaces, reducing duct size and fan and pump energy.
Project objectives include:
1. Confirm the cost savings compared to the typical alternative all-electric solution.
2. Confirm predicted energy and carbon performance is achieved.
3. Gather, analyse, and report on monitoring data to ensure occupant acceptance; optimize operation of pilot system; and inform optimized design and operation of future installations.
4. Develop and disseminate exportable knowledge and products to support solution scale-up.
Traditionally, concrete has been the predominant material for housing foundation/basement construction.
In Alberta, on average, over 35,000 new homes start construction annually. 75% of them are single-family, semi-detached and townhome units. The total embodied carbon of concrete foundations in these homes is estimated to be 198,410 tCO2e. Replacing concrete with NLT (Nail-Laminated Timber) for building foundations can reduce emissions in three ways.
1) Reduce embodied carbon of the building by eliminating the usage of concrete. A typical 2,200-square-foot single-family home in Edmonton region uses 41 cubic meters of concrete and 530 meters of steel rebars for the basement, resulting in an embodied carbon of these two materials is 12.95 tonnes CO2e. In contrast, constructing the same basement using NLT would result in an embodied carbon of only 1.10 tonne CO2e, less than 10% of using concrete and steel.
2) The NLT basement would use approximately 17 cubic meters of lumber and sheathing, storing and estimated 15 tonne of CO2e in the structure.
3) Cast-in-place concrete requires at least four-days of winter heating in the winter for curing, but NLT foundation does not. By eliminating four days of heating, while NLT foundations do not. This will save 630 liters of propane, reducing GHG emissions by 0.8 tonnes per basement in the winter.
In partnership with the University of Alberta, Landmark plans to construct 60 NLT foundations with various housing types in 2025 and 2026, reducing embodied carbon by 1,103 tonnes CO2e.
Despite wooden foundations, PWFs, have been accepted by Canadian building codes for nearly 40 years, they have not been widely adopted due to general public’s misconceptions about durability of using wood in foundation and concerns that wood is prone to moisture damages as underground structure. These concerns can be addressed through demonstration projects and public education on the features and benefits of mass timber.
This project aims to demonstrate a high-performance mass timber foundation solution using prefabricated Nailed-Laminated (NLT) panels for buildings covered under Part 9 (Housing and Small Buildings) of the Alberta Building Code. Sixty NLT foundations will be constructed for various housing types, starting with simpler walkout townhomes and progressing to more complex single-family homes, to showcase the effectiveness and versatility of the NLT solution.
The goal of the project is to demonstrate a high-performance NLT foundation solution for residential housing and prove its viability. To achieve this, the project has three key objectives:
1) Obtain regulatory in Alberta
2) Construct 60 NLT foundations with different housing types over two years
3) Demonstrate the advantages and economic viability of BLT foundations to support large scale adoption
Siksika Housing is working with two local housing companies to build two pilot energy efficient pilot projects. Form Polarblock has constructed an insulated foundation system with an R value of 31, while EcoPlast has designed, manufactured, assembled and finished the above-grade portion of the home using a patented panelized insulated wall system which uses recycled plastics that creates a home with no thermal bridging and R value of 30. The panelized construction system reduces the construction period, saving Siksika Nation time and money for new home construction, which is much needed due to Siksika Nation’s growing housing gap.
This housing project would be the first Cleantech installation of its kind for Siksika Housing and presents an opportunity to analyse and learn from the results for future decision making. In addition, project learnings will be shared with housing representatives with the Blackfoot Confederacy.
This project achieved SSRIA’s priority outcomes by developing educational materials on residential deep energy retrofits (DER), mainly by creating an introductory DER Guidebook currently hosted on the SSRIA website, by producing introductory DER course material delivered via five (5) modules, and lastly by constructing physical DER wall example mock-ups for inclusion in SAITGBT’s existing wall library.
SAIT-GBT hosted multiple DER Discovery Sessions on the SAIT campus, followed by multiple pilot deliveries of the DER course material (both in-person and via webinar), all of which were attended by interested construction industry professionals, SAIT faculty/instructors, SAIT students, and building owners/homeowners.
Video document trades orientation and various construction processes of a Passive House multi-family building in Edmonton for learning purposes. This project did not develop a course in itself but materials that will support existing curriculum at Alberta educational institutions.
The project is needed to create a video repository of cold climate high-performance building and construction videos to augment existing educational courses created by post-secondary institutions across Alberta.
Window blinds are widely used in commercial and residential buildings to block solar radiation and reduce the effect of solar gain on indoor overheating. AI shading is applying its unique dynamic control strategy to automate window shade operation in a student room at NAIT.
The control strategy uses real-time environmental data inputs – such as weather, solar radiation, and temperature – and adjusts the corresponding actions of window blinds to regulate the indoor thermal conditions of the space. In summer, when there is sunlight entering windows, the blinds on those windows will move downwards to block the sunlight and reduce the solar heat gain. However, when a window orientation is not directly in the sun, the blinds will stay open to gain the natural light from outside. In winter, the operation is reversed to utilize solar heat for passive heating of the indoor space. At night, all the blinds will close to keep the user’s privacy.
AeroBarrier is an innovative product that will lower the air leakage of an existing building by an average of 40-70% with no demolition required. For this project, AeroBarrier was applied to a small commercial building from the 1950’s to address air leakage expected in an old building but also exacerbated by the multiple adaptations as various tenants have moved in and out. As many commercial spaces, closing for weeks on end for renovations is not feasible. AeroBarrier is a solution that can be quickly completed to get businesses up and running again.
The project looked to reach carbon neutrality by providing needed energy efficiency upgrades as well as installing renewable energy onsite. When complete the residence can entirely disconnect from the gas utility. The aim is twofold, to do this without disruption to the building structure and to make the transition financially viable through avenues accessible to the average homebuyer/owner.
This approach looks to address the issue of the large carbon footprint left by demolition and rebuilding residences to reach net-zero. It is also a proposed solution for homes that are on 0-lot lines built from 1995 to today which do not have the option of insulating the exterior of their homes.
The new Passive House Pavilion is the flagship public amenity at the Banff Recreation Grounds. It has an innovative building envelope and high-efficiency mechanical system that dramatically reduces energy needs, and sequesters carbon through extensive use of natural, sustainable, and local materials, prefabricated mass timber and sustainable wood fibre insulation. Key design challenges included 1) achieving a 100-year service life, 2) adhering to the strict architectural requirements of the Banff Design Guidelines, and 3) Compliance with the Town’s Municipal Sustainable Building Policy and the Passive House Low Energy Building standard.