GTA businesses celebrate 12% drop in energy use in office towers — equal to taking 4,200 cars off the road

NationalPost.com
Nov. 5, 2015
Alia Dharssi

A chatty crowd, including Ontario’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, landlords and executives from businesses across the Greater Toronto Area, gathered Thursday for an award ceremony in downtown Toronto to celebrate a 12.1 per cent drop in collective energy use — the equivalent of taking 4,200 cars off the road — between 2011 and 2014.

“We’ve got to do something. It’s the right thing to do. It’s not only good for our business, but it’s good for our tenants,” said Tullio Capulli, vice-president of property management at Morguard Investments, of the four-year initiative dubbed the Race to Reduce. It asked GTA offices to cut down on their total energy consumption by 10 per cent.

Capulli oversaw the retrofitting of a 50-year old building at 77 Bloor St. West that had two floors dedicated to old machinery for heating, ventilation and air conditioning. Morguard pared the machinery down to one floor, opening up extra space for rent, and reduced energy use by 34 per cent.

The Race to Reduce was launched in 2011 by Civic Action, an organization that brings business executives together to respond to challenges facing the GTA and Hamilton. Office space accounted for 20 per cent of the GTA’s carbon emissions at the time, according to research by the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority.

Between 2011 and 2014, businesses and landlords of 196 buildings covering more than 69 million square feet — or 42 per cent of commercial office space in the GTA — participated in the challenge. Toronto City Hall and the TD Bank Tower were among 21 buildings that reduced their energy use by 20 per cent or more over the three years by upgrading heating systems, installing more efficient lighting and other conservation measures.

Seventeen buildings, including offices in Vaughan, Oakville, Mississauga, Burlington and downtown Toronto, topped the list for using the least amount of energy. The buildings had an average score of 95.5 out of 100 on Energy Star, an international standard for energy efficiency, which is 37 points above the national average for commercial space.

But the Royal Bank of Canada, which has almost 4.5 million square feet of office space in the Toronto area, stole the show by winning three team excellence awards in partnership with three of its landlords. Its projects involved electronic sensors that lowered lighting levels by taking advantage of daylight and arranging for cleaners to do more work during the day in order to reduce lighting at night, said Nadeem Shabbar, global head of real estate at RBC.

Though the participants saved $13.7 million, Roger Johnson, a senior vice-president at TD Bank, said the initiative had more to do with environmental concerns. “It doesn’t turn out to (save) a lot of dollars and cents. … You have to recognize that this is for the betterment of the environment, betterment of the community.”

Even so, significant work remains. “The big problem we have in Toronto is that every 10 years we add about 34 million square feet of office space and, that office space, 90% of it is built more than a kilometre away from subway stations and Go stations and higher-order transit,” said Glen Murray, Ontario’s minister of environment and climate change.

With transportation accounting for 35 per cent of the GTA’s carbon emissions, the provincial government plans to spend billions on expanding public transit.

Meanwhile, some companies, including RBC and TD, are driven to make change to attract young talent who are concerned about sustainability.

“A big part of our employment brand is to show the millennials and the next generation that we care about this,” said Johnson.