There are a variety of ways to transmit the information required to operate and maintain a building. Appropriately, there has always been focus on drawing and manual updates, but experienced building managers know that these efforts fall short. The past twenty years have seen the rise of electronic information systems, some of which incorporate information from building automation and computerized maintenance management systems - but these can fall victim to the same factors which compromise their paper progenitors.

Resilient and sustainable building management depends not only upon paper and electronic records, but also upon the communications among knowledgeable operations and maintenance staff. These interactions, often referred to as “tribal knowledge” or “institutional memory” are frequently undocumented and underappreciated, so are easily lost with staff turnover, or contract changes.

How should a building manager organize and lead a team which retains resilient and sustainable building systems knowledge even while turning over staff? This presentation will cover the make-up and practises of a resilient facilities management team. The presenter will cover skill-sets of the team members, organizational communications tools, regulator-mandated skills and tasks, roles of contracted vs. in-house staff, tag-hanging and other field-level communication tools, reporting of equipment status, interactions between operations and maintenance, and the translation of trouble-shooting into effective corrective maintenance.

Orvil Dillenbeck, Section Head, Mechanical, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories
For over twenty years, Orvil Dillenbeck has worked in design and operation of mining, healthcare, nuclear, commercial and institutional heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. He is a member of ASHRAE committee 7.3 – Operations and Maintenance Management, and chairs that group’s handbook chapter subcommittee. He has benchmarked best practises in operations and maintenance management at Atlanta Centers for Disease Control, Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, Carleton University and University of Ottawa campuses, and he has presented at ASHRAE conferences. Orvil is Section Head for mechanical systems at Canadian Nuclear Laboratories’ Chalk River campus.

Most building systems consist of a mix of mechanical and digital systems which weren’t designed to work together, often resulting in sub-optimal building performance. Techniques such as re-commissioning and retro-commissioning do not address the root cause of this problem.

As the building industry evolves, more intelligence is being pushed down into individual HVAC components to enable them to control themselves, and to enhance capabilities of the building automation system. Connecting these intelligent devices to cloud-based analytics allows building owners to move from reactive system maintenance like fault detection and diagnostics to proactive, predictive maintenance which manages building performance in real time, preventing faults and downtime and making the building more resilient when faced with unexpected changes in building performance requirements.

This session will share learnings and best practices from collaborative development with IBM Watson to create the latest generation of intelligent HVAC equipment, and the analytics that support real time performance management. Participants will also hear the building owner’s perspective on deploying this new technology.

Liviu Craiu-Botan, National Manager, Energy and Technical Services, Oxford Properties Group
Liviu Craiu-Botan, P.Eng., C.E.M., is responsible for Oxford’s industry-leading Energy Management program that achieved over $50M avoided energy costs over the past eight years. Oxford is one of Canada’s leading commercial real estate firms with a portfolio that extends to over 50 million square feet of office, retail, industrial, hotel, and multi-residential assets in Canada, USA, and Europe. Liviu is active in numerous professional associations and technical committees in Canada and internationally, such as ASHRAE, Association of Energy Engineers (AEE), Canadian Standards Association - ISO 15000 Energy Management System Standard Technical Committee, BOMA Toronto Energy Committee, and Canada Green Building Council (CaGBC).

Yves Lemoine, P.Eng., Director Energy Upgrades, Armstrong Fluid Technology.
Yves is a professional engineer with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the University of Waterloo. His experience spans 3 decades with a focus on energy management, building services, manufacturing and consulting. He has worked on three continents and in over two dozen different countries for private and public entities and has a unique ability to see the world from both the client’s and service provider’s perspective. Yves is a founding member of the Energy Services Association of Canada and the Australasian Energy Performance Contracting Association, was involved in introducing ASHRAE 90.1 into the Ontario and National Building Code, developed and ran the first utility electricity conservation incentive programs in Canada, in Asia and Australia and now is focused on delivering high performance HVAC upgrades to building owners, managers, engineers and contractors.

Climate change in Canada is progressing much faster than previously thought, with temperatures warming more than twice as fast as across the rest of the globe. Building resilient infrastructure and managing potential climate risks has become one of the top priorities for infrastructure owners, including provincial and federal governments.

In this context, the Real Property Branch of Publics Services and Procurement Canada are actively evaluating climate-related risks and vulnerabilities faced by federal properties in order to identify adaptation measures and guide long-term investment. A key component is climate change vulnerability assessment, which has been undertaken for various federal buildings such as one located in Sept-Iles in Quebec. The assessment was based on the Public Infrastructure Engineering Vulnerability Committee’s (PIEVC) Engineering Protocol (developed by Engineers Canada), which is a multi-disciplinary and systematic approach to evaluate climate vulnerability, and evaluate the severity of climate impacts on building components.

Since its first publication in 2008, the PIEVC Protocol has been used in Canada, and internationally, to evaluate infrastructure, from wastewater treatment plants to airports and buildings. The focus of this presentation is twofold:
i) to present a recent application of the Protocol to a federal building, highlighting how application has evolved since it was first used to assessing federal buildings in 2008, including use of the newly available Canadian Centre for Climate Services data portal; and,
ii) to present lessons learnt and recommend strategies to make application of the Protocol efficient and effective.

Among the challenges and lessons learned in applying the Protocol, the following will be discussed: defining the boundaries of the analysis; finding and analyzing climate change data; setting relevant thresholds for each climate parameter; inclusion of operations and productivity relating to the infrastructure; mobilizing stakeholders for the risk evaluation workshop; and, implementing adaptation measures as part of strategic management of Federal real estate properties.

Joanna Eyquem, Climate Change Practice Lead, AECOM
Joanna Eyquem is the Climate Change Practice lead for AECOM across Canada. She has extensive knowledge in the field of climate change science, natural hazard management and adaptation planning. Joanna is professionally qualified in both Canada and the UK, and has been working since 2001 to ensure development projects take into account future natural processes. Joanna is a key driver behind the “Freedom Space” approach to river management, taking into account flood and erosion risk in Québec. She also helped develop and test the PIEVC protocol for assessing the vulnerability of infrastructure to climate change impacts. Her previous experience in the UK included the pilot study, “Climate Change Adaptation on the Wear”, which, in 2009, was the first UK study to tackle vulnerability assessment and adaptation at a catchment-scale.

Clara Champalle, Climate Change Specialist, AECOM
Clara Champalle is a Climate Change Adaptation Specialist at AECOM. Clara has been working on climate change adaptation projects in Canada and abroad since 2010. She has 10 years of project management experience and coordination of multidisciplinary teams in multicultural contexts. Clara is currently working on applying Engineers Canada’s PIEVC Protocol to evaluate climate change vulnerability of federal buildings in Quebec and on developing a Climate Resilience Plan for Via Rail across Canada. Prior to these projects, Clara worked for eight years as a consultant and a researcher on projects dedicated to increasing climate change resilience food security of agriculture-dependent communities in developing countries for several United Nations agencies, research institutes, and the McGill University Climate Change Adaptation Research Group.

Laure Gerard, Environmental Specialist, Public Services and Procurement Canada

“Passive House buildings are at the frontier of technology and know how.”
Amina J. Mohammed, United Nations Deputy Secretary-General

This presentation will offer an overview on the passive house (PH) methodology, explain the difference between passive solar and passive house, the science behind the different passive house energy efficiency benchmarks and its pre-requisites for hygiene, indoor air quality and comfort. We will go through the different passive house certification options for new buildings and retrofits with on-site renewable energy generation and without, show the latest developments in building typologies and research that are pushing PH adoption worldwide and explain how the international passive house standard effectively contributes to our climate change adaptation and mitigation imperatives ensuring extreme durability, passive survivability, moisture resilience, radical energy efficiency, exemplary comfort, reduction in GHG emissions and affordability in clean energy generation investments with a performance that lasts.

The urgency of climate change puts many things into very different perspectives than what we are used to. Energy saving benefits are well known since the oil crisis in the 70’s and the agenda was; the more we save, the better but even saving a little bit is good! Now it is quite different under climate change urgency action, doing a little bit is not enough, it may prevent from more ambitious action later as it can create a lock-in effect and unable us to achieve our 80 by 50 goal affordably in the future. The enerPHit (Passive House for existing building energy retrofit standard) will be presented as a tool to achieve up to a factor 10 improvement in heating energy consumption for existing buildings, acknowledging the difficulties we face in retrofits and presenting the step by step retrofit approach that mitigates the risks of lock-in effects and enables long term deep energy reduction action.

The tremendous potential of energy efficiency in propelling us towards the future we want at scale is a fact. PH is being adopted as "Law" by numerous cities and jurisdictions across North America. The examples of City of Vancouver, the province of BC, New York and Toronto will be discussed. The business case of passive house will be explained including PH economics and how each of its metrics contributes to optimizing sufficiency, efficiency and renewable energy investments.

Canadian experience with PH: pilot projects, case studies, policy and PH certified component development will be shared and PH adoption barriers analyzed.

Parks Canada Agency experience with PH through various initiatives and feasibility studies in harsh service environments to achieve our ambitious government goals in GHG emission reductions will be looked at in details to evaluate the technical feasibility and economic suitability of the Passive House standard, highlight further industry innovation needs for very cold climates and touch on the challenges and opportunities to adopt the PH standard as policy.

Sonia Zouari, Contemporary Architect, Parks Canada
Sonia Zouari, OAA, OAQ, CPHD, TTT, is a Canadian Passive House Institute Co-Director, Top 10 Passive House Leaders (2019 CDCR) and an award winning architect with over 20 years experience. Sonia is a recognized expert in sustainable design. Her contributions to Ontario’s built environment and the architectural profession have also been acknowledged by the Ontario Association of Architects blOAAg series “Women in Architecture – Ontario”. Sonia’s work focuses on high performance buildings and sustainability. Her biggest differentiator is her expertise overlap between architecture and energy modeling that allows her to integrate both building science and design principles seamlessly to develop holistic solutions, drive performance and deliver measurable environmental, social & economic prosperity.

To address the issue of implementing climate resilience into its own assets and operations, Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) embarked on a pilot project to assess the climate-related hazards for real property assets in the National Capital Area (NCA). Climate data parameters for each hazard were identified and projected changes to these parameters under multiple future climate scenarios were determined.

The work conducted in this pilot project identifies many of the specific climate hazards that will become more common and more extreme for Government assets in the NCA. PSPC will use the information from this study to prioritize adaptation actions for real property asset types and inform future climate change risk assessments in the NCA. This pilot project will also be used as a template for future studies in priority PSPC locations across the country.

Maxime St. Denis, Manager, Climate Action, GHG and Energy, Public Services and Procurement Canada
Maxime St. Denis is a Building Engineer with a Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Concordia. For the better part of the last twenty years, Max has worked as an energy specialist for the Federal government. He started his career at Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) in building systems research and development and then moved on to Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), where he focused his attention on portfolio energy management, energy project implementation and quality control on construction projects. The last four years have seen Max and his team providing national functional direction on climate change mitigation and adaptation for real property services.

Maria Mottillo, Engineer, Climate Action, GHG and Energy, Public Services and Procurement Canada
Maria Mottillo is a professional energy engineer with PSPC’s Real Property Services Branch. Maria is part of a team that led PSPC’s National Smart Buildings Initiative which led to the installation of Smart Building Services in 103 of PSPC’s buildings and aims to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from PSPC’s crown-owned portfolio by 6%. Maria’s work at PSPC also includes embedding the reduction of GHG emissions into the decision making process for all real property projects. Most recently, Maria worked on implementing climate resilience into PSPC’s assets and operations in order for the department to reduce the risks associated with a changing climate. Maria previously worked as a project leader at NRCan developing energy simulation software for sustainable building design and for demonstrating compliance to energy codes, for the residential and commercial building sector. She also developed and implemented models of new technologies to determine their technical feasibility in areas of energy, climate change and clean air.

Dr. Neil Comer is a Senior Climatologist with Risk Sciences International (RSI). With 20 years of experience, Dr. Comer has worked in the private sector as an applications engineer/instructor (Weather Services International), in the public sector with the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC) and the Adaptation and Impacts Research Section of Environment Canada (EC), and currently in academia as adjunct professor (University of Toronto Scarborough). At EC, Dr. Comer shared responsibility for developing the Atmospheric Hazards network, and the Canadian Climate Change Scenarios Network (CCCSN), a set of on-line applications supporting the validation and selection of climate change projections for specific climate parameters and geographical locations. Dr. Comer has served in the past as climate science advisor to the Ontario Regional Climate Change Consortium and was a reviewer for the IPCC AR5 SREX (Extremes) Report. Dr. Comer has provided analytical services and training to a range of industrial sectors, including agriculture, and has been an invited speaker at many international climate change meetings including the Smithsonian, and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He is also the architect of RSI’s climate analytical system and the Climate Change Hazards Information Portal (CCHIP). 

A distributed energy storage (DES) system can be a central component of an organizations energy and facility solutions. The solution needs to be flexible in order to deliver value in multiple ways, depending on the organizational resiliency needs, the energy-related goals, and the realities of the utility environment. Our discussion will inform attendees of the how DES systems can be implemented to deliver long term benefits for their organization, thus allowing end users to get the most value from the DES system. Key topics to be covered will include renewable energy support, peak shaving, backup power, demand management and micro-grid applications.

Renewable Energy Support: More and more enterprises are actively pursuing green energy alternatives, and DES systems help in this mission by serving as a bridge between traditional energy sources and alternative ones. For example, when a renewable energy source can’t temporarily provide enough energy, a DES system can step in. By providing renewable energy support, DES systems can promote sustainability, lower costs, and improve overall energy resiliency.

Peak Shaving: The price of energy is typically at its highest during periods of peak demand. DES systems can support peak shaving to reduce expensive energy costs. With peak shaving, your DES battery is charged during periods of low demand (for example, overnight) and discharged during periods of high demand. This is particularly economical for companies whose rate is determined during peak demand. We can help you with the economics of energy storage to make your system most effective.

Demand Response: Distributed energy storage systems are often viewed as ways to save money on energy costs. But the demand response functionality can enable you to make money by allowing you to participate in incentive programs designed to reduce power consumption during periods of peak demand.

Backup Power: Distributed energy storage systems can serve as a reliable source of backup power in case there is loss of power from the grid due to severe weather conditions or other issues. By helping facilities remain operational, our energy storage systems help our customers eliminate costs of downtime.

Micro-grid applications: Informative case studies that showcase the environmental and economic benefits of implementing DES in remote locations, as well as urban centres, will also be discussed.

Brandie Williams, Business Development Director, Johnson Controls
Brandie Williams is the technical advisor for distributed energy battery solutions including PV and micro grids. She is responsible for selling and servicing large, complex, bundled offerings with guaranteed savings to public sector organizations and various business verticals. Her experience, capabilities, and credentials include sales and consulting professional with over 25 years of engineering and sales experience. In the technology industry she has served as an advocate for regulatory and regional utility power providers, with a focus on federal and state policies. Previously, Brandie served as the Director of Application Engineering and Project Management at SMA America Utility and Commercial Inverter Division, as well as, being the owner of clean energy focused businesses, such as Your Energy, Inc., and V2 Energy Solutions, LLC. Brandie has a strong background in comprehending complex solutions and translating the value new technology to customers at all levels.

Globally, and here in Canada, microgrids are being successfully implemented across communities, campuses, military bases, and various other facility types for many different reasons. Depending on the technologies implemented, these distributed energy resources systems can provide attractive benefits such as provision of ancillary services, greater integration of renewables, improved economics, resiliency, and reduced carbon emissions.

The business case for microgrid implementation is a complex analysis, which can be reliant on both regional and site-specific characteristics. A financial model was developed in 2018 by the University of Windsor Ontario’s Environmental Energy Institute (EEI) led by Dr. Rupp Carriveau and Dr. Lindsay Miller to support financial decision making for the implementation of microgrid systems using a microgrid project being deployed at a Southwestern Ontario High School as a live example to test the model. The objective of the project was to provide resiliency to the school while achieving net-zero carbon emissions and participating in Ontario’s energy market for both energy and ancillary service revenue opportunities. A combination of technologies including geothermal, solar, energy storage, microgrid and grid islanding controls, building and EV charging load controls, and an analytics platform were selected. The model developed by the EEI was designed to assess the economic feasibility of exactly this type of system and includes a 30-year financial model that examines the interplay between energy prices, technology, and policy. The model considers several factors including the capital expenses of the project, future projections for electricity and natural gas costs, CO2 emission credit values, declining costs of new technologies, savings from implemented efficiency measures, and global adjustment mitigation. The first part of the presentation will outline the case study of this project and provide relevant findings to the audience.

Building on this case study, the financial model will be applied to assess replicability potential of microgrids at different facility types across Canada including the Federal Government’s portfolio of existing and new buildings. A set of sensitivity analysis examples will be presented to the audience whereby variables within the model will be changed to demonstrate how each variable influences NPV results. For example, each province has different energy pricing structures, incentives, electricity generation profiles, and credits which could drastically impact economic feasibility. Furthermore, this analysis will seek to identify characteristics of facilities and locations where it would make financial sense for companies to act as an integrated utility, controlling the delivery of energy to innovative microgrid systems. Lastly, this work will present a framework for tracking relevant metrics such as cost savings, carbon emission reductions, and energy efficiency improvements against baseline metrics to build business cases for these types of projects and demonstrate successful implementation.

Jim Fonger, Vice President, Distributed Generation, Ameresco Canada Inc.
Jim Fonger is currently leading Ameresco Canada's development of Distributed Energy Generation (DER) assets including microgrids. He has led Ameresco's development of the Greater Toronto Area's largest grid connected 16MWh energy storage system now providing energy and ancillary services to the Ontario IESO controlled grid. He is also leading the development of Canada's first commercial microgrid at a high school in London, Ontario. Jim entered the energy industry as the founder of an energy storage start-up company in 2006 and joined Ameresco in 2010.

Dr. Rupp Carriveau, Professor, University of Windsor
Dr. Rupp Carriveau is a Professor at the University of Windsor in Civil Engineering. He is the director of the Environmental Energy Institute as well as the Turbulence and Energy Lab. His broad research activities include terrestrial and offshore energy systems, energy storage and energy markets, systems optimization, fluid structure interactions, and emerging agriculture practices. Rupp has many ongoing industrial collaborations including partnerships with energy and water utilities, wind power producers, automotive manufacturers, and agricultural producers.

Dr. Lindsay Miller, Adjunct Professor, University of Windsor
Dr. Lindsay Miller is an adjunct professor and instructor at the University of Windsor in the Engineering department. Her current research focus is in renewable energy and innovative energy finance and procurement. Lindsay has been active in discussions with renewable energy developers and forward thinking companies to understand the mutual needs and challenges around project development and clean energy procurement. Lindsay has a strong background in the environmental and economic impacts of energy and pursues research objectives that focus on achieving a sustainable and economic energy future.

The Energy Services Acquisition Program (ESAP) has finally launched the $1.6 billion modernization of the district energy system that provides heating to 80 buildings and cooling to 67. For tenants on the system it checks all the boxes – it is resilient, efficient and green – and it frees up space that would normally be dedicated to furnaces and cooling towers in a regular building.

In addition, the new plants at Cliff Street and Tunney’s Pasture will achieve a level of design excellence rarely seen for industrial facilities like these and educational facilities will be incorporated at both sites. Not only will this help ESAP to blend in with its neighbours – the Supreme Court and the other buildings in the Tunney’s Pasture Master Plan – but it will be a primary channel for sharing messages about GHG reduction and the move to a low carbon society with students, visitors and federal employees.

The system modernization also sets the stage for expansion to other government buildings as well as private sector buildings facing capital investments for heating and cooling. In addition, the new system will be well positioned to connect to new developments in LeBreton Flats and in the downtown core. In the end, the ESAP modernization has the potential to make a significant contribution to the reduction of GHGs within the community and across the National Capital Region.

Don Grant, Manager, Engagement, Energy Services Acquisition Program, Public Services and Procurement Canada
Don Grant has a BA from Carleton University and a Masters from Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC. He currently works for Public Services Procurement Canada (PSPC) as a Manager of Communications and Engagement. Don has been an environmentalist for 25 years and in that time has worked in the private sector, the non-profit sector and for government.

Don was a co-owner of the consulting firm Innovative Management Systems before it became part of Jacques Whitford and later Stantec. Don was also the Executive Director of the Ottawa Centre EcoDistrict before joining PSPC.

Tomasz Smetny-Sowa, Senior Director, Energy Services Acquisition Program, Public Services and Procurement Canada
Tomasz Smetny-Sowa has a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering with specialization in Building Systems from Gdansk Technical University in Poland. He worked in the private sector as a consultant for 8 years and, after joining PSPC as a Mechanical Engineer, he became Manager of the Mechanical and Electrical Engineering team in 2009. Following the 2009 boiler explosion at Cliff plant, Tomasz led the Temporary Boiler Plant team from concept to commissioning.

Tomasz has been the Senior Program Director of ESAP since June 2012 and he leads a diverse team responsible for the ESAP Modernization Program.