Ottawa, ON — Funding will be made available soon for those looking to improve building efficiency. Natural Resources Canada is calling for proposals for the Codes Acceleration Fund (CAF), which plans to invest $100 million to help provinces, territories, municipalities, Indigenous governments, and stakeholders decarbonize the built environment.
Proposals will be accepted until March 27, while proposals from Indigenous governments and organizations will be accepted on an ongoing basis until March 31, 2025.
Projects will be accepted in two streams. The first will support jurisdictions with the authority to adopt energy codes. Secondly, it will provide support for organizations without the authority to adopt energy codes. This includes eligible recipients such as not-for-profit and for-profit organizations legally incorporated or registered in Canada, regional and municipal governments that don’t have the authority to adopt building energy by-laws or codes, utilities, and Indigenous governing bodies, organizations, and communities.
Stream two applicants are invited to outline plans in their proposed projects to develop capacity-building resources, tools and approaches that will accelerate code adoption, compliance, and/or enforcement and to expand and disseminate the results of their project.
According to CAF, there are three objections:
- Accelerating the adoption and implementation of energy performance tiers of the national model energy codes;
- Promote higher rates of compliance with adopted codes; and
- Build capacity and support market preparedness for ambitious code adoption.
The CAF was developed to help accelerate the adoption of, and compliance with, higher performance tiers set out in the newly published 2020 codes or with other high-performance codes such as net-zero emissions codes.
The National Energy Code has four tiers of performance improvement, with the last tier yielding at least a 60 per cent reduction in energy consumption over the baseline tier one. The National Building Code has five tiers of performance improvement, with the last tier yielding at least a 60 to 70 per cent reduction in energy consumption over the baseline tier.