Daily Home Renovation Tips

It has been a full two years now since the Canadian Federal Government’s ecoENERGY Residential Retrofit program began (April 1, 2007) in an attempt to provide awareness and financial incentives to Canadian homeowners to make their homes more energy efficient.

This is the program where two energy audits (called by the ecoENERGY program energy efficiency assessments) are performed on a single or multiple dwelling home. In between the two energy audits, the homeowner has 18 months to undertake specific energy efficiency improvements for which financial grants are available under the program administered by Natural Resources Canada (with for the most part matching grants from most of the Provinces and Territories).

If you are not familiar with the ecoENERGY program in Canada, simply scroll down just a little to our Energy Conservation Sites listing over on the left and select the (green, of course ) ecoAction graphic.

Now, even though I personally use Google Alerts to be made aware of articles published on the web for certain key words, I have yet to see one which actually reported on the 2-year progress of the ecoENERGY Residential Retrofit program. Am I the only person in Canada who is interested in how a Federal Government program is proceeding after 2 years? Hopefully not. Hopefully all Canadians are interested in how all Federal Government funded programs are progressing; after all, it’s our tax dollars hard at work.

The information in this short series of articles was received upon request from Media Relations, Natural Resources Canada a few days ago. We thank them for their continued openness with respect to providing us with this information every six months.

Today, we focus on the participation aspect of the program.

Below are the participation statistics for the ecoENERGY Retrofit - Homes for the first two years ending March 31, 2009:

Number of Energy Audits

                 2007-08      2008-09     Total       % Increase     % Stock

D               98,158        181,205      279,363          85%              2.80% 

E&F*          17,642          76,369        94,011         333%              0.90%

*F - not sure what the F energy audit is? Neither was I, so I asked. I’ll fill you in about the new-ish F energy audit in a few days. However, for now,  consider the F like the E.

For those of you who are not aware, the ‘D’ line above represents the first energy audit which determines, among other things, which energy efficiency related home improvements the particular house is eligible to receive grants under the ecoENERGY Residential Retrofit program. The E&F represents the second or follow-up energy audit which determines, among other things, which of the recommended or eligible energy efficient home improvement renovations were actually completed.

OK, those are just a bunch of numbers, what do that mean?

Well, the good news is that the number of Canadian households participating in the program is increasing (98,158 in 2007-08 vs 181,205 in 2008-09). In fact, 85% more homeowners signed up to participate in Year 2 of the ecoENERGY Residential Retrofit program than did in Year 1.

In part this could, subjectively, be attributed to greater awareness of the program the longer it runs plus the dramatic increase in oil prices in 2008.  It will be very interesting to see the same statistics a year from now with the plunge of oil prices.

The number of homeowners who have had the second or follow-up energy audits have dramatically increased. However, I’m not too sure if I should be overly excited about this increase. Since homeowners are allowed up to 18 months to have the second energy audit under the rules of the ecoENERGY program, one has to expect that there will necessarily be a significant time lag between the two energy audits.

What is disappointing to me is the last column above. The % of Stock refers to the percentage of houses built prior to 2000 that are estimated by Natural Resources Canada to participate in the ecoENERGY Residential Retrofit program.

This metric indicates that over the first 2 years of the ecoENERGY program, only 2.8% of eligible houses are participating in the program across the country.  The Province with the greatest percentage of eligible houses participating is Saskatchewan at 7.8% with New Brunswick being second at 5.7%.

Is it reasonable to expect a country, committed to fighting climate change, would call a success a program meant to motivate it’s country’s homeowners to make their homes more energy efficient when only 2.8% of eligible homes are participating … after 2 years of the program?

I don’t know. Yes, it is better than nothing. Sure, there have been achievements in polluting emission reductions from the participating homes (which we will write about over the next few days).

But at the macro perspective is 2.8%, well, good?

I just don’t know.  I tried to find comparative programs in other countries and what their participation percentages might be but could not come up with anything.

I know at least one University Professor visits our site and reads these articles from time to time. If any academics out there (or anyone for that matter) can provide us with comparative program participation rates in other countries, that would be appreciated, especially the sources of the statistics.

Next time (tomorrow), we’ll look at the payouts and savings during the first two years of the ecoENERGY Residential Retrofit program.

To continue to the next article in this series, simply select this link to Part 2.