The Ontario Association of Architects began a project to retro-fit their own headquarters in Toronto to make it Net-zero Carbon in March 2014. As a member of the Sustainable Built Environments Committee of the OAA, Coolearth principle Sheena Sharp has been involved in conceptualizing the need for the project, as well as guiding it’s direction which aims…
This Thursday Sheena Sharp, a principal at Coolearth, and Trevor Nightingale, the Program Leader, High Performance Buildings at National Research Council will present a seminar entitled “Making Net-Zero Commercial Buildings a Reality”. From the Construct Canada Website: For the early adopters, it is typically not a simple ROI but rather there are often less tangible…
Coolearth will be presenting a seminar on our net-zero conversion of a semi-detached residential building as well as hosting a booth as part of the Passive House Canada Pavilion on November 30th. Our seminar will take place on November 30 from 9-10:15am. Look for us in the South Building (code w300). The brief…
The second post in our series re-capping the Sustainable Built Environment Conference September 19th and 20th in Toronto will feature a presentation by Arborus Consulting group’s R. Hutcheson, S. Jorens, and D. Knapp on “Low carbon heating for commercial buildings using grid-supplied electricity during Off-peak periods.” It is a very fascinating idea that holds a lot of potential (as our notes…
We were happy to attend the Sustainable Built Environment Conference September 19th and 20th in Toronto. There was so much material and interesting ideas that we decided to do a series of blog posts re-capping the presentations. The first post is on a talk that Pamela Blais, of Metropole Consultants gave entitled “Land Use Planning:…
Ontario’s climate action plan seeks to improve the energy efficiency and performance of buildings in order to reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions. The province has identified that we need to take all buildings to Net-Zero or near Net-Zero Energy Use. This means upgrading the leaky, badly insulated homes which pre-dominate much of Toronto and were built…