District of Squamish wants BC to enact legislation that will empower local governments to regulate cooking and heating installations in new and existing buildings.
Many existing and new buildings rely on gas or oil for cooking, air and water heating, and have high greenhouse gas emissions footprints even at Step 5 of the BC Energy Step Code, the district says.
Currently, local governments are restricted in their ability to regulate the sale, rental, and installation of cooking, heating and hot water systems in new and existing buildings.
The district wants the province to create a new law that will empower local governments to regulate the cooking and heating systems.
The district also wants the BC government to enact Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) legislation to develop a “pay as you save” energy retrofit incentive program for residential and commercial building owners.
A Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program is an effective way to facilitate critical building retrofits, but existing legislation creates a significant administrative burden and other barriers for local governments wanting to implement the program, district says.
Such a program will meet local targets while bringing money into the economy, add new jobs to the market, and reduce energy bills for citizens.
Existing buildings account for 11 perc ent of BC’s current greenhouse gas emissions, and retrofitting those buildings is critical to BC meetings its climate targets, the district says.
Squamish also wants BC government to enact legislation to enable local governments to require building Emissions and Energy rating and labelling.
Ihor Zalubniak says
This is unbelievable. Perhaps converting oil burning heating systems could be incentivized but converting gas to electric or other source doesn’t take into consideration the imbedded carbon foot print the existing systems have that would be replaced with new carbon footprints. This is destructive and non-contributory to reducing green house gasses. A better reduction could be found by improving highway capacity from Squamish to Porteau. And, also, perhaps turning down the volume on tourism promotion.
alex says
Maybe the staff would like to regulate the number of times we flush the toilet and hire an inspector .