Greening Sacred Spaces Ottawa’s Energy Benchmarking Program: What’s New?

Are you concerned about your faith community’s energy bills?

Following a successful 3-year program, Greening Sacred Spaces (GSS) Ottawa is once again opening its free Energy Benchmarking Program (EBP). They are happy to welcome returning and new participants to the EBP program this year! Additionally, GSS Ottawa is offering five participating faith communities a grant of $2000 to implement an energy retrofit in their building. The program is currently funded by the City of Ottawa, the Ottawa Community Foundation, and the Sustainable Capacity Foundation.

GSS Ottawa is an environmental non-profit that inspires and supports diverse faith and spiritual groups to take action to build greener, healthier, more resilient neighbourhoods. The over 400 faith communities in GSS Ottawa’s network include churches, mosques, synagogues, spiritual retreats centers, and Indigenous spiritual spaces.

Reducing our energy consumption is directly correlated to reducing carbon emissions, one of the primary sources of greenhouse gases—and GSS Ottawa’s Energy Benchmarking Program aims to help our local faith communities do exactly that. In its first three years, the Energy Benchmarking Program has encouraged a lot of positive change in Ottawa faith communities and has been incredibly encouraging to see the excitement and leadership faith communities are taking in green initiatives.

Through its work, the EBP has helped faith communities take note of variations in their energy usage over the years, and helped identify areas that can be addressed. For example, The Sri Sathya Sai Baba Centre noticed a spike in electricity usage that started in the winter and continued into the spring. After an investigation, they noticed that someone had turned up a couple electric baseboard heaters to their highest setting, and left them on. After this realization, remotely programmable smart thermostats were installed which has consequently lowered their energy bill, particularly because it allows them to control heating remotely and ensure settings are not permanently changed by occasional users.

"The EBP has been on the whole very positive: we know we are being a little bit kinder to the environment," remarked Al Quirt, a volunteer at Kanata United Church, another participating faith community. Surveys of other participants have echoed the informational and inspirational benefits of the program. 

GSS Ottawa was first established as the local chapter of the charity Faith and the Common Good in 2004, and officially became a non-profit in 2017. The Energy Benchmarking Program began as a collaborative pilot project between GSS Ottawa and the United Church of Canada on Project Footprint to track the emissions of United churches in the Ottawa area. After completing this project, GSS Ottawa recognized that although many faith communities are interested in becoming energy efficient but struggle to gather their own energy data. In 2019, GSS Ottawa—as well as a successful program in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area—established the Energy Benchmarking Program to help faith communities track their energy usage and find ways to become more sustainable. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” This has become the motto of GSS Ottawa’s Energy Benchmarking Program.

During the EBP’s first 3 years, GSS Ottawa helped 50 participating faith communities take practical, cost-effective action by raising awareness and understanding of their building's energy use and emissions. Because 42% of emissions of faith communities’ carbon footprint come from buildings, tracking and reducing buildings’ energy usage is a great way to reduce carbon emissions. The program was funded through grants from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, along with the Ottawa Community Foundation, TD Friends of the Environment Foundation, and the Sustainable Capacity Foundation.

GSS Ottawa also has a new addition to the energy auditing team: Better Buildings Ottawa. The Better Buildings program is run by the City of Ottawa to guide non-residential building owners and operators in implementing ways to increase their buildings’ energy efficiency, and consequently reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. 

GSS Ottawa and Better Buildings are offering participants of the Energy Benchmarking Program an Energy Performance Scorecard and Insights Report. This report will include their annual greenhouse gas intensity (GHGI), total annual greenhouse gas emissions, site energy use intensity (Site EUI), and their energy star score. It will also compare all of these performance metrics to properties of the same type and give an overall performance score.

But what do all these metrics mean? When reading the report, participants will learn that GHGI represents the greenhouse gas emissions per square foot per year of each building; site EUI is the amount of energy used in the building per square foot per year; and the Energy Star Portfolio Manager score is calculated by taking all these metrics into account along with total greenhouse gas emissions and a building’s physical attributes, its operations, and how much the people inside use it. This is a great way to get a good overview of the energy efficiency of the building in question. 

Furthermore, the report will also include graphs representing monthly energy performance, categorized by electricity usage and thermal energy. The report also shows the buildings baseline energy usage and breaks down usage by heating, cooling, and the type of energy source.

The final section of the report gives insights on possible improvements that can be made to the building to improve their ranking and overall energy efficiency. Participants will receive concrete personalized suggestions from members of GSS Ottawa & Better Buildings Ottawa team on how to reduce their energy consumption. These include smaller actions such as installing programmable thermostats, installing LED lights, and even motion sensored lighting as well as bigger projects, such as replacing windows & doors, upgrading the HVAC system, or installing heat pumps.

As part of the Better Buildings program, participants will also receive discounted building envelope thermal inspections. This will provide them with information about where energy is being lost in their building, as well as identifying potential structural problems & moisture leakage. This inspection may also include a thermal scan to provide information of where the building is losing heat. Finally, they will be offering training programs for building operators, strategic energy management and organizational net-zero planning.

The EBP program is working tirelessly to guide faith communities on their journey to carbon net zero and support them every step of the way. Interested in participating? It’s a very easy process: simply register on the Better Buildings website, and then send your 2022 energy data information to the GSS Ottawa Energy Benchmarking team. Visit our website for detailed instructions on how to get started on your energy benchmarking journey!

Emily is a sustainability intern at Greening Sacred Spaces.