Welcome to our newest Building Benchmark BC partners!

As you may have seen on our social media pages, we’ve got some new municipal partners joining us from all over the province for Building Benchmark BC’s third consecutive year! Building Benchmark BC began in 2020 and has quickly grown throughout the province to become Canada’s biggest and most successful voluntary building energy benchmarking program. We are pleased to offer a warm welcome to our new partners for Year 3: 

• The City of Nanaimo

• The Township of Esquimalt

• The City of Port Moody

• The City of Port Coquitlam

Keep an eye out for the results this fall at buildingbenchmarkbc.ca!

Winter is coming - is your heating system at risk?

While we’re feeling the late summer heat for now, we could be in for another cold winter ahead. Did you know that around 29% of furnaces in BC are over 15 years old and at a high risk for failure? 

Take the Home Heating Risk Assessment Survey to find out if you’re at risk of being left in the cold this winter! The survey will take approximately 5-10 minutes to complete, and you can expect a risk assessment with a timeline and replacement options in your inbox within 5-7 business days. 

NRCan’s Discussion Paper on Buildings Strategy

Natural Resources Canada has released a discussion paper on the Canada Green Buildings Strategy, and we were pleased to see benchmarking and disclosure highlighted, as well as signals that the federal government will be removing new oil and gas furnaces from the market. Read the full discussion paper here [PDF]. 

Welcoming Jesse Sherlock to the OPEN Technologies Team!

We’ve got a new face here at OPEN Technologies: Jesse Sherlock, our new Director of Technology. 

Jesse is a software developer with 20 years experience, mostly in web development, distributed systems, web crawling, data pipelines and developer tools. He is passionate about code simplicity, free and open source, data privacy and mentoring the next generation of developers. Jesse converted to Clojure 10 years ago and it has ruined other languages for him.

Outside of work, he enjoys running, hiking, backpack camping, meditating, reading and spending too much time building developer tools.

New and Notable

A few news stories, reports, opportunities, and other resources that recently caught our eye:

• One of Building Benchmark BC’s partner jurisdictions, the City of Victoria, is requiring that all new construction projects must be “zero-carbon” by 2025, meaning that no new buildings or homes will be heated by fossil fuels! Read more about it here.

• The City of Vancouver moves forward with the Vienna House rezoning application, which will bring 123 affordable, efficient housing units to the city. Learn more about the project at viennahouse.ca. 

• Interested in a heat pump, but not sure where to start? Check out this introduction from BC Hydro to learn more about what a heat pump does, and what options are available! 

• As the summer comes to an end, keep an eye on the BC Green Building Event Calendar for upcoming events this fall!