Jun. 03, 2009 - Issue #711: Rancid

Spreading the green around

Innovative project aims to make eco-friendly housing more accessible

Here's the predicament: you're a green-minded Edmontonian who owns an older home with bad windows, an old, creaky furnace and high power bills. You know that retrofitting your house to make it more energy efficient will significantly reduce your personal carbon emissions while at the same time saving you money on your monthly utility bills, but you just don't have the money up front to get the work done. Or you're confused when you try to navigate the maze of different incentives for home retrofits offered by the various levels of government. Or you've decided to upgrade your house, but find yourself stymied when it comes to finding the right contractors for the job.

It's barriers like these that stop most homeowners in the city from upgrading their home and significantly reducing their own greenhouse gas emissions—it's estimated that a third to half of Canadians' personal carbon emissions are from their homes—despite the smorgasbord of recent government incentives offered to encourage green retrofits.

But the Greater Edmonton Alliance (GEA), a grassroots coalition of about 30 community organizations, faith groups, unions and small businesses, has recently launched a project called Sustainable Works which it hopes will kickstart energy-saving retrofits in the city, and at the same time create hundreds of new jobs in the emerging green economy.

"The main aims of Sustainable Works are three points," explains Omar Yaqub, GEA's Sustainable Works director. "The first is creating green-collar jobs, the second is making utilities more affordable and the third is reducing our carbon footprint. How do we make those things happen? The key to unlocking these three things is eco-refits, not done by an individual, but at a community level—working with unions, working with church groups, working with community organizations to really organize neighbourhoods rather than just individual houses and one-offs. By so doing we really unlock the potential of working together and we get benefits from better purchasing."

The idea is that GEA, through its network of community groups, will organize a number of homeowners in a given community who are interested in having retrofits done on their houses and connect them all with pre-screened energy auditors and multi-trade contractors who can carry out all the work required. Because GEA plans to deliver a number of houses located near one another as a single contract, they can negotiate preferential pricing with contractors and bulk buy things like windows and furnaces, further driving down the cost of the upgrades. GEA project managers also do the work of pooling and applying for the various government incentives and grants available to homeowners, and carry out quality-assurance checks on the work at the end of the process, streamlining what is now a daunting process for homeowners.

"If you’re going to retrofit your house you’ve got to get an audit, you’ve got to interpret that audit, you’ve got to phone this contractor, this contractor, this contractor, you’ve got to figure out a way to pay for it and you’ve got to figure out whether you actually get a savings on your bills, a return on that up-front capital layout," explains Michael Walters, GEA's lead organizer. "It’s pretty complex; that’s why most people don’t do it. So what Sustainable Works does is put that all together, so it’s like one-stop shopping."

In return for being given the opportunity to bid on these large-scale work orders, contractors are required to pay workers a living wage and offer job opportunities to marginalized groups, such as youth and recent immigrants, something Walters says he's heard over and over again is desperately needed in the communities GEA works with.

"We pre-qualify these contractors based on [those criteria]," Walters says. "The big underlying principle behind all this is shifting away from this myth of individual consumption to doing things as a community. The trade-off for the contractors is that if they want this work they’ve got to take these apprentices and give them opportunities to get into good jobs."

The final piece of the puzzle, says Yaqub, is removing the up-front financial barrier faced by families.

"The biggest thing for most people is the capital outlay costs. Everyone can agree that it makes a lot of sense to put in that new furnace, but they say, 'I’d really love to, but I just don’t have the money to plunk down right now.' Even though you know it’s going to pay for itself in three to four years, a lot of people resist doing it because they don’t have enough money up front," he says. "And this is especially a big concern for people living at the margins, for people in affordable housing, the people who would benefit the most from having an extra $100 in their pocket: they’re the ones who aren’t able to take advantage of it because they don’t have that $3000 to put up."

To get over that hurdle, Yaqub says GEA plans to negotiate with financial institutions and utility providers to completely remove the up-front costs from the process by allowing homeowners to pay off the cost of the upgrades through their monthly power bills. Partner financial institutions would offer low-interest loans to pay for the renovations at the outset, and homeowners would continue to pay their utility bills at pre-retrofit levels, with utility companies passing the difference back to the financial institution until the balance of the loan is paid off, at which time the family's utility bills drop and the money is freed up to lend to another house and so on.

"We have something where there’s a well understood, appreciable payoff—you know that over a few years this will pay for itself—you know that there’s a house—there’s a tangible asset to tie it to—and you know that it’ll benefit the environment, so there’s a lot of really good reasons for organizations to get involved in the financing part of this."

GEA estimates that the average retrofit will cost between $15 000 and $20 000, with a five- to seven-year payoff period, but as power costs rise the time needed to pay off the loan shrinks. Walters says a rotating fund of roughly $25 million, which could come from either financial institutions or government funding, will likely be required for the project.

At least that's the plan. While Sustainable Works is based on similar projects in Washington State—which have completed 800 retrofits in the first year alone, with plans to do another 2400 in the coming year thanks to a recent state bill that will give the program $34 million in funding—the project in Edmonton is only in the pilot phase.

GEA has already negotiated reduced rates for energy audits and has secured the support of a number of provincial unions for the program. Fifteen houses in Edmonton, including seven affordable housing units provided by E4C and a church, are currently undergoing energy audits through the program and will start retrofits next month. A grassroots training session on May 30 trained over 50 volunteers who will now go into their communities to talk about the program, with the goal of securing pledges from 500 homeowners who agree to have energy audits and retrofits done under the Sustainable Works banner.

Walters says successfully carrying out the pilot projects this summer and demonstrating that GEA has the capacity to organize and deliver a large number of homes wanting retrofits are in preparation for a November assembly which will bring together financial institutions, utility companies and governments to sign onto the program.

"When we can work together and get 500 people pledging for an audit, getting a neighbourhood pledging to do refits, that’s when we really realize these untapped savings," adds Yaqub. "That’s when we can make demands of governments or demands of utilities, when we all speak up."

While Sustainable Works is still in its infancy, the potential impacts are significant. Yaqub says GEA hopes to complete 500 retrofits in 2010 and 2500 more homes in 2011, similar to the number planned this year in the Pacific Northwest, which have shown impressive results.

"In Spokane—and this is a fifth the size of Edmonton—they’ve created about 170 new jobs, 60 apprenticeship positions, they’ve eliminated about 10 000 tonnes of carbon emissions," Yaqub says. "They’ve enabled about $15 million in new construction and they’ve saved about $3 million in utility bills for the families in their first year."

More important than the numbers, Walters says, is the potential to give a far more diverse cross-section of Edmontonians the opportunity to benefit—both in job opportunities and in reducing their energy consumption—from a less carbon-intensive lifestyle.

"In the current system nobody really has any power whatsoever over utility companies. When you get your bill you can’t phone them up and negotiate with them, you just have to pay it or they’re going to cut you off. What we’re trying to create is a more community-congruent system where you have some power just by needing less," Walters says. "We use the term 'eco-equity' because, like local food, retrofits are a middle- and upper-class game. If you don’t have any money you can't participate. So this removes that barrier. So many of the pilots are being done on affordable housing projects and the working poor and the working-class families that can’t afford to lay out the money up front. So it brings energy efficiency to the poor." V 

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