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Upgrading Older Assets and Influencing Fresh Attitudes
July, 2010
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| Keiko Nakamura, Chief Executive Officer, Toronto Community Housing |
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By Steven Chester
Toronto Community Housing (TCH), Ontario’s largest landlord, has about 2,500 different buildings in 300 different communities across the City of Toronto. The portfolio consists primarily of aging assets, with the age of the buildings averaging 50-years plus.
“We were built, as you can imagine, at a time when energy, fuel and so forth probably were not at the forefront of people’s minds in terms of cost efficiency,” says Keiko Nakamura, Chief Executive Officer of Toronto Community Housing. “So this has been a challenge for us and many other landlords.”
When trying to make the buildings more energy efficient, changing the types of mechanics was the starting point, says Nakamura.
The current plan for TCH is to adopt building automation systems, allowing the company to track its energy usage, see if and where there are leaks in the systems, find overusage, and monitor and manage various components. At the same time, TCH has been going through its entire portfolio and retrofitting the buildings with energy efficient windows and upgrading lighting.
Most important, Nakamura says, is changing tenant behaviors. A key factor with tenant involvement is waste and recycling – and making it easy for the tenant to recycle.
“We in fact have employed tenant animators who have actually gone out to increase people’s education and also to give feedback to the staff on what we can be doing differently in those buildings,” Nakamura says.
For TCH, looking at opportunities in multiple sets of buildings, like its Laurence Heights or Regent Park properties, gives the company another opportunity to think about leveraging energy on a large scale.
“So at Regent Park, what we have is an opportunity of a multiple set of buildings that will all be connected in to a community energy system,” Nakamura says. “So in fact, we have been able to see long-term gains by doing that.
“When we look at all the replacement of some of these buildings, part of our costing strategy assumes that we will in fact be running more efficient buildings when we actually replace the asset. For example, with Regent Park, we have managed to reduce the energy requirements by 40 per cent in terms of how you actually operate the buildings.”
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