Ottawa Community Housing’s (OCH) and Hydro Ottawa’s partnership to install electric vehicle (EV) chargers, solar panels and heat pumps in housing communities will be expanded upon to make more cuts to carbon emissions.

“This is both organizations acknowledging, ‘Hey, we both have this mandate for decarbonization and delivering great service to our communities.’ In fact, our work impacts each other, so let’s make a conscious effort to partner and make sure that we are achieving each other’s goals,” Daniel Dicaire, senior manager for conservation and sustainability at OCH, said in an interview with Sustainable Biz Canada.

OCH currently has four EV chargers at two locations for its fleet and an EV sharing program with one EV charger, 37 solar arrays that generate under one megawatt of electricity, hundreds of heat pumps, and building automation systems in 18 buildings. OCH plans to increase its use of all these technologies with the help of utility Hydro Ottawa.

Both organization have partnered for over a decade on ways to reduce carbon from OCH’s portfolio and improve energy efficiency. Now that OCH has its projects and targets and initiated decarbonization, it now needs a decarbonization pathway, Dicaire said. Its plans need to match its capital plan to fund its efforts.

OCH, Ottawa’s largest affordable housing provider, manages approximately 15,000 housing units for 33,000 tenants.

Doubling down on decarbonization

Since 2012, OCH has collaborated with Hydro Ottawa to add solar energy generation at its properties. As OCH is owned by the City of Ottawa, it shares the city’s climate master plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 96 per cent by 2040.

Sustainability goes hand-in-hand with efficiency and affordability, Dicaire said.

“Sustainability works with efficiency in that, in order to make something affordable, you also need to plan for that long-term energy efficiency features into that affordability, because by making homes much more efficient, that means the tenants or the landlord, we end up paying less.”

OCH commissioned a greenhouse gas inventory to measure its 2021 pollution. The affordable housing organization found it emits approximately 27,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from its end (natural gas, heating, hot water systems), and 36,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from its tenants from activities related to natural gas, electricity, transportation and waste.

Now that the emissions have been calculated, Dicaire said it is time to make a decarbonization roadmap for all of its buildings and figure out how to expand the program, deploy the capital and where to find the funding.

OCH conducts building condition assessments, and will match the findings of those assessments, such as when a boiler needs to be replaced, to maximize greenhouse gas reductions in its capital planning.

Six EV chargers are planned to be added to its community at 715 Mikinak Rd., with over 30 expected for the Gladstone Village project.

Over 50 heat pump installations in townhouses were finished this year. OCH has designs to have 260 heat pumps installed at individual townhomes.

The number of buildings with automation systems that optimize energy use will increase from 18 to 45.

OCH also plans to deploy more decentralized energy assets such as energy storage.

Dicaire hopes the partnership will be an example of “how developments should be done” to tackle climate change.

Emphasizing energy efficiency

Dicaire highlighted the importance of energy efficiency as part of the partnership. The more OCH electrifies – incorporating electricity-intensive infrastructure such as EV chargers – there is more pressure on Hydro Ottawa. If a developer does not produce high-performance buildings or delays clean energy, it saddles more capacity on a utility. Thus, the inefficient building becomes a stranded asset, he explained.

But if buildings are more efficient, if more solar panels are installed, if batteries are deployed, there is less strain on the grid and Hydro Ottawa can be better prepared.

Programs from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation that prioritize energy efficiency have helped OCH fund its developments. The community housing non-profit explored creating green bonds with the help of the Canada Infrastructure Bank, Dicaire added.

Housing affordability ties into energy efficiency as well. It lowers operating costs and OCH sees more value on spending its capital to boost building performance.

As OCH expects to hold on to its buildings for decades, it cannot skimp on energy efficiency, unlike private developers, as it must see the benefits for a longer term. OCH also cannot turn a profit. So while it is financially constrained, it is pushed to make investments on elements such as energy efficiency as a good use of public funds, Dicaire said.