High costs expected to come with net-zero energy ready buildings

Prior to the Clean BC announcement, President of the Canadian Home Builders’ Association Central Interior, Kelly Reid says they had researched what the changes would mean for Kamloops.

“So we did a study last year to see what it would cost to do a typical house in Kamloops to net zero energy standard, and it came out at $78,000 in additional costs,” he explains. “Homes are already challenging for a young family to afford. And that would just continue to make those prices go up, so that’s one of the concerns we have around it for sure.”

Acknowledging the government’s efforts to bring more social housing in, CHBA’s BC President, Matt McCurrach, says the added costs means people will have a tough time finding new homes affordable.

“Economically, we’re not going to be able to get people into homes if we keep on this path of housing costs continuing to go up,” McCurrach says. “And the mortgage stress test is another one that’s really impacted the industry. So it’s a bit of a scary time right now for people to afford homes, and the layering of additional costs is not helping.”

Reid agrees, pointing out working on making the older homes energy efficient would be worthwhile.

“I think that’s one of our big focuses when we talk about the environment. We can’t ignore the existing housing stock because those are the homes that are using the most energy.”

Retro-fitting older homes in Kamloops would be no small undertaking, and McCurrach says plans on how to go about doing so remain a little unclear.

“We would like to see, if we’re going to be making new homes more stringent to build, then theres got to be a program in place to get the old housing stock up to snoff, if it’s truly about saving the environment.”

While supporting the green initiative, City of Kamloops Building and Engineering Development Manager, Jason Dixon, says the City would also like to have a clearer picture of what older homes will need to be energy efficient.

“More money or more details on that retro-fit strategy would be welcomed by us, I think opportunities to improve the older homes and older buildings, I think there’s a lot more to be gained energy efficient-wise there.”

Dixon says the province has developed the plan, however the city will be deciding how it is implemented.

“We can control it by neighbourhood if we wanted, we could control by housing type, or housing size,” Dixon explains. “So we’ll look at all those options to see if there’s anything that makes sense for Kamloops.”

As this plan could impact more than just affordability and existing housing stock, builders will be watching closely how residential home construction will be affected in Kamloops.

“It’s also all the jobs that could potentially be impacted by drastic changes to the way we build homes,” Reid explains. “There’s 3,400 jobs — that’s 3,400 families. Typically, the jobs in our industry are good paying jobs that support families, so we would hate to see that impacted as well.”

Guided by the National Energy Code, the new standards for building upgrades are set to be developed by 2024.

by Dylana Milobar

High costs expected to come with net-zero energy ready buildings

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