City of Vancouver's plan to clean up buildings' GHG emissions starts June 1

Starting June 1, the City of Vancouver's largest commercial buildings — those over 100,000 square feet such as office towers, shopping malls and institutional buildings — will have to start reporting what their emissions are, estimated by how much energy they are using.

The change is part of the city's efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions from buildings by 50 per cent by 2030, then 100 per cent by 2050.

“In a dense city like Vancouver, building emissions are the largest (source of emissions),” said Micah Lang, a team lead in the city's sustainability group. “Fifty-seven per cent of our emissions in Vancouver come from buildings, and the vast majority of that is from burning fossil fuels for heating those buildings.”

Reducing the carbon footprint is something most large building owners were already working on before Vancouver passed its Annual Greenhouse Gas and Energy Limits bylaw in 2022, so its requirements don't come as a big surprise, according to engineer Rod Yeoh.

“Most of the clients I have talked to are larger institutional clients with portfolios of buildings. They have known this has been coming for a little while (and) have been planning how to comply,” said Yeoh, who works for the architecture firm DIALOG and is on the city's technical advisory committee.

On balance, however, there is “a mix of readiness as you would expect,” according to Damian Stathonikos, president of the Building Owners and Managers Association.

Stathonikos said the city has been good about working with the association's less-prepared members to get in line. The “tricky part” now for a lot of members, he said, is the administrative work required to get buildings' energy meters connected to what is called the Energy Star Portfolio Manager.

Penalties under the bylaw's regulations kick in starting in 2026.

WHAT'S FIRST?

Buildings report their emissions first by signing up with the Energy Star Portfolio Manager, a software system available through Natural Resources Canada. They also must share their complete building profile with the city's Energy Star account and file a claim under Vancouver's building performance system.

“(Energy Star) is an industry standard. There are already thousands of buildings that used it in Vancouver before we even rolled out this bylaw,” Lang said.

The largest commercial buildings, those over 100,000 square feet (9,290 square metres), need to start reporting emissions by June 1. Lang said office towers taller than 10 storeys are typical examples of those first buildings, and the city has a list of 288 buildings that fall into this group.

The next group of buildings, 898 of them, are commercial buildings between 50,000 square feet (4,645 square metres) and 100,000 square feet, and multi-family residential buildings bigger than 100,000 square feet (typically about 20 storeys). They need to report emissions by June 1, 2025.

Residential buildings between 50,000 square feet and 100,000 square feet, 678 of them, including hotels, hospitals and dormitories, need to start reporting emissions by June 1, 2026.

HOW ARE EMISSIONS MEASURED?

“The primary piece of work is entering the utility data, electricity use and natural gas use” into Energy Star, Lang said. “Both FortisBC and B.C. Hydro have created auto-upload features where, if you give them permission, they will populate your monthly utility bills into the software for you.”

Emissions are calculated based on energy use per square foot, primarily the emissions generated by every gigajoule of natural gas burned. Lang said a similar factor is used to calculate emissions for buildings hooked up to district energy systems.

This, however, is where some of the administrative headaches crop up for building owners, Stathonikos said. There are cases where building owners, particularly in industrial buildings, have single tenants who pay the utility bills. In the past, they had no need to see meter readings, so it is a challenge to co-ordinate.

Building owners can be issued $500 bylaw violation notices for each day they don't comply with reporting requirements. But Lang said the city isn't looking to penalize every building that doesn't comply on time. “Our priority is to help them ... figure out how to comply successfully.”

HOW WILL GHG LIMITS BE ENFORCED?

The first cap on emissions will take force in 2026 with office buildings limited to 25 kilograms of carbon per square foot per year and retail operations limited to 14 kilograms, which Lang said were set “to cover the worst-performing quartile, or third of buildings.”

Then in 2040, buildings larger than 100,000 square feet will face more stringent heat-energy limits of 0.09 gigajoules per square foot per year.

Lang said enforcement will happen by way of a requirement that buildings obtain operating permits that become more expensive if they exceed emissions limits. The basic permit will be $500, but owners will pay $350 per tonne of CO2 that they exceed their limits.

HOW REALISTIC ARE THE EMISSION-REDUCTION TARGETS?

Lang said the 2026 limits are set “at a level most buildings could comply with through taking simpler actions,” and about three-quarters of the first group of large buildings to report emissions already fall under that first cap.

Stathonikos said that first limit will be “doable,” but owners do have concerns about targets beyond 2030, particularly among office properties that have less vacancy and more uncertainty about future operations.