At this year’s
Race to Reduce award ceremony, CivicAction announced it was closing in on its goal of collectively reducing participants’ energy use by 10 per cent over four years.
Three years into the friendly competition to reduce energy consumption by commercial landlords and tenants, participants have collectively reduced energy use by 7.9 per cent. “The numbers show the desire for action is there, and that if you give people the tools and motivation, they can drive real change in their own businesses and for the Toronto region,” said CivicAction CEO Sevaun Palvetzian at the December 4 event.
The past year also saw more buildings participating, with an 11 per cent increase in the number of buildings registered. There’s now more than 69 million square feet entered in competition—more than 42 per cent of the Toronto region’s office space. Landlords and tenants work together to save energy, employing an array of strategies ranging from major building upgrades to simply encouraging staff to turn off lights when there’s no one in a room.
Cadillac Fairview’s TD South Tower won the award for Building Performance for Greatest Energy Reduction for a property between 500,000 and one million square feet, beating out the competition and the other five buildings in the
Toronto-Dominion Centre. The South Tower won, in part, because the landlord optimized the building’s boiler to make it more efficient and installed dimmable, motion-detection emergency lighting in the stairwells. But in all of the TD towers, Cadillac Fairview has introduced a variety of energy-saving programs, including a daytime cleaning program, which saves on the cost of lights and HVAC needed for nighttime cleaning. By defining its normal hours of operation more strictly, the building also saves on after-hours lighting and heating costs. Efforts have paid off: South building used 8.5 per cent less energy in 2013 than in 2012.
“We have been at this for quite some time and have made a lot of progress,” says David Hoffman, general manager of the Toronto-Dominion Centre for The Cadillac Fairview Corporation.
So far, Race to Reduce conservation has achieved the equivalent of taking approximately 2,700 cars off the road and put $7.6 million back into participants’ pockets.
The complete list of winners is available
here.
Writer: Paul Gallant
Source: David Hoffman