BANFF – The Town of Banff has hit a home run with the new multi-purpose pavilion at the recreation grounds in terms of environmental performance.
The rec grounds pavilion, which opened in July 2023, is the first building constructed under the Town’s stricter municipal sustainable building policy adopted by council in 2021.
“It’s by far the most efficient building we’ve ever built by a factor of four or five depending which building you compare it to,” said Michael Hay, manager of environment for the Town of Banff.
“It’s a great story from an energy standpoint, from a greenhouse gas emissions standpoint. The pavilion’s energy performance has met all expectations during the first year of operations.”
Council has set targets to reduce the community’s greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent by 2030 and 80 per cent by 2050 compared to 2016 levels.
The pavilion, which is used by sporting groups, visitors, community classes and includes washrooms and showers, was required to comply with Banff’s municipal sustainable building policy.
Design features helping with the pavilion’s energy efficiency include thick foam insulation under the foundation, thick walls and roof insulated with wood fibre; triple glazed windows and doors, quadruple glazed skylights; airtight envelope; commercial air source heat pump for heating and cooling; and high performance energy recovery ventilator.
Hay said the pavilion’s design includes dowel-laminated timber walls – the first commercial building in Alberta to use them – as well as mass timber roofing/over roofing and central support columns, and wood fibre insulation.
“These components sequester an estimated 130 tonnes of carbon for the life of the building,” he said.
Energy consumption, costs
Hay said the air tightness test score is much higher than the target, attesting to the high quality of construction, and that the air source heat pump system is also performing well.
“Based on staff observations during the January 2024 cold snap when temperatures dropped to as low as -41 Celsius, the heat pump system delivers plentiful heat to the building down to at least -30 C,” he said.
“Below this temperature, backup electric resistance heaters provide supplementary heat.”
Looking at utility data from the first 12 months of operations, Hay said the pavilion has the best energy performance of any Town building by a “wide margin”, with energy use intensity of 130 kWh/m2.
He said the buildings most like the pavilion in size and function are the Town’s public washroom facilities, and the Middle Springs Cabin.
The Wolf Street washroom and rec grounds washroom use about five times as much energy as the pavilion, he said, which is not surprising considering their age.
However, Hay said the Central Park washroom was built as recently as 2015 and yet consumes nine times as much energy as the pavilion.
“This is partly due to the heavy public use the facility receives because of its central location,” he said.
“However, it is also a result of weak building codes combined with little attention to energy efficiency during the design process.”
Hay said the Middle Springs Cabin consumes more than double the energy of the pavilion, even though it sees very little use, primarily due to the poor energy efficiency of the building given its age.
“The pavilion clearly shows that busy public buildings can be beautiful and functional, while also being exceptionally energy efficient, when supported by effective policy direction,” he said.
Hay said the pavilion is significantly cheaper to operate than any of the Town’s other public washrooms based on the first nine months of utility bills.
“This is impressive given that the pavilion relies solely on electricity, which costs three or four times more than natural gas for the same energy,” he said.
Greenhouse gas emissions
Hay said the pavilion’s greenhouse gas emissions are significantly lower than most other buildings, even though the planned 17-kilowatt solar array has not yet been installed.
He said solar would reduce the building’s grid electricity consumption and greenhouse emissions by an additional 60 per cent.
Powered solely by electricity, the pavilion’s greenhouse gas emissions will automatically improve as the Alberta electricity grid transitions to low-carbon generation sources over time, said Hay, or with any future green energy purchases by the Town such as renewable energy credits or power purchase agreements.
“Almost all of the energy of the pavilion is electricity and for the moment electricity is still a little dirtier than natural gas from an emissions standpoint,” he said.
“But the whole point here is that the electricity grid is getting greener, and we’re putting solar on our buildings and that helps those buildings get greener.”
To meet its greenhouse gas emissions targets, Banff’s renewable energy transition plan recommends development of energy performance standards that lead to a Passive House requirement – or equivalent – by 2030 for all new buildings in Banff. Passive House is considered a world-leading standard in energy-efficient construction that reduces a building’s carbon footprint.
However, Hay said energy efficiency requirements for new construction in Alberta’s building code unfortunately fall far short of this standard, and the province hasn’t indicated if or when higher energy efficiency standards will be adopted.
“Municipalities are also not permitted to increase these standards on their own, as stipulated in the Alberta Safety Codes Act,” he said.
“To provide inspiration and leadership to private builders, reduce GHG emissions, reduce energy costs, and avoid expensive retrofits in the future, council has directed administration to build Town projects to a higher standard than code.”
Coun. Barb Pelham was curious if Banff Housing Corporation projects had to meet the municipal sustainable building policy and questioned what additional costs that would bring for the municipality’s below-market housing offers.
While it was hard to nail down costs, administration indicated BHC projects are subject to the policy, though environmentally efficient buidlings can be eligible for funding.
Alison Gerrits, director of community services for the Town of Banff, said much of the cost of the pavilion project was offset by a $439,200 grant from the Smart Sustainable Resilient Infrastructure Association (SSRIA) because of project innovations.
“An element of constructing a building like this is it opens up significant opportunities for external funding that would not otherwise exist unless this approach is being taken,” she said.
“Almost half a million dollars in grant funding was brought into this project specifically because of the design elements of the pavilion.”
Hay said he wanted to clarify what the municipal sustainable building policy “is and what it isn’t”, noting there is an assumption the policy somehow reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
“It doesn’t. No policy can do that, but in particular you can’t reduce emissions by building a new building generally speaking… if you build a new building you’re adding emissions because buildings use energy,” he said.
“The purpose of the municipal sustainable building policy is to hold the line. It’s to keep us from getting further in the hole on greenhouse gas emissions and we are very in the hole for greenhouse gas emissions.”
To illustrate his point, Hay pointed to The Aster below-market home ownership housing development on the 300 block of Banff Avenue.
“If you think about what was once on that site before, it was two small old houses that no doubt were very, very inefficient. Replacing it with The Aster, which is a much more efficient building on a per square metre basis, still results in a massive increase in emissions,” he said.
“I assure The Aster is emitting far, far more greenhouse gas emissions than those two little houses. It’s a net increase in emissions even though the building was built very well.”
