Energy Performance Tiers in Building Code?
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In 2015, Canada signed onto the international Paris Agreement to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius. In 2016, the federal government created the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change, which all provinces and territories signed together.
Within this framework, buildings in Canada would make up a significant part of the national strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy demand. This meant that we needed to set targets for improving the energy efficiency or performance of our buildings.
Those performance targets were broken down into Steps or Tiers, with B.C. leading the way for the rest of the country with its 2017 Energy Step Code. The tiers range from the lowest Tier 1, to the highest Tier 5.
The prescriptive 2020 National Building Code of Canada acts as the starting point at Tier 1. The highest performance step, Tier 5, is about equivalent to Passive House. The table below from the NBC describes the different Tiers and how they are measured:
