Sundance Retrofit - Renewable

The case for retrofitting — updating old structures instead of building new ones — is built on a bedrock of statistics and figures. But one number in particular stood out to us during our look at the Sundance project for this episode of Renewable. It’s a number we bumped into in speaking with everyone involved in the project, from engineers to residents. It’s a number that almost always comes up before any argument from comfort, or aesthetics, or even energy consumption. It’s a number that makes you picture the future a little differently.

Again and again we heard that 70 to 80% of buildings that will be standing in 2050 (the year set out in the Paris Agreement for reaching medium term climate action goals) are currently standing today. That means not just the structures themselves, but the energy that goes into powering them. When we picture the skyline of tomorrow, it should look, roughly speaking, 80% the same as the skyline today. Same goes for the energy it takes to power that skyline.

This fact immediately raises a whole slew of questions that retrofitting as a general practice hopes to answer. In this episode, we spoke with Jean, Sandy, and Stewart about the Sundance project — an ambitious panelized retrofit on a community scale. Panelized retrofits are an exciting new subcategory of retrofitting that uses digital scanning and off-site construction to reduce labor and construction costs.

We spent the episode digging into panelized retrofits specifically, which came at the expense of our ability to look at retrofitting from a birds eye view. When you step back and look at the space as a whole, some interesting things come into focus.

Right now, 40% of our global emissions go towards powering our homes, offices, and spaces. When we consider that nearly half of our emissions comes from powering our buildings, and that most of these buildings are going to be standing for decades to come, we see that how we build new buildings is a smaller part of addressing building emissions as a whole. We need to reduce the emissions of buildings we already have, and we need to be investing the same resources into innovation in renovation as we do into construction. Maybe more.

But considering that most retrofits are still done by individual homeowners (assuming the cost themselves) an argument from emissions only goes so far towards convincing the relevant parties to foot the bill. It’s here that the process of how a retrofit actually works becomes relevant. If we tally up the list of average exterior upgrades a homeowner will have to do over 50 years of home ownership, and we compare that to the list of changes that are included in a retrofit, we see an almost complete overlap. The Venn diagram is a circle so to speak. A typical retrofit combines window, siding, roof, and HVAC replacement with significant upgrades to insulation and air-tightness. Panelized retrofitting takes decades worth of projects and upgrades and contracts them down to a single bill and a single project that takes weeks rather than years to complete.

In a sense, retrofitting is the most convenient and cost effective way to do something that, as a homeowner, you’ll have to do anyway.

But maybe the most tangible benefit — the one that people will notice when they step foot inside a house or building that’s undergone a modern retrofit — concerns comfort. As Jean, Sandy, and Stewart all discussed at length, a home that has undergone a retrofit is just nicer to be in. The temperature is more stable and less vulnerable to outside climate fluctuations due to insulation. The window wells are deeper and more aesthetically appealing. It’s quieter. It looks good.

Sundance is an experiment. It’s taking all the arguments for retrofitting (plus a burgeoning new approach to the process) and seeing how it scales to a community level. But if you’re interested in seeing what a retrofit might mean for your property, there are resources available. Whether it’s the local retrofitting consultants that are a search away, or the resources available right here on Change for Climate, the information is available for anyone who wants to find it. But the technologies most compelling advocates are the people who have seen and experienced it themselves.

And if you’d like to see a few of them in action, you can check out this most recent episode of Renewable.

Renewable is a series about visionaries, creators, community leaders and above all else, Edmontonians, each with a unique vision of a sustainable future in the heart of Canada’s fossil fuel industry.

For more information, visit edmonton.ca/RenewableSeries.