Building Benchmarking
Learn about Surrey's involvement in Building Benchmark BC.
The City of Surrey is continually working on ways to reduce the amount of carbon pollution produced by our buildings.
Buildings are responsible for one third of the carbon pollution in Surrey. Understanding how our buildings use energy is an important step to figuring out how best to reduce that pollution.
To reach the net-zero greenhouse gas reduction target, as defined in Surrey’s Official Community Plan, carbon pollution will need to be nearly eliminated from most buildings before 2050. City staff are working to update the Climate Change Action Strategy through 2021 and will begin development of a climate plan for buildings later in the year. Both will guide the City’s action in this area.
Building benchmarking will be key to this success, both for the City and building owners and managers.
What is Building Benchmarking?
Building energy and emissions benchmarking is the process of monitoring a building’s energy consumption and carbon pollution over time and comparing them to similar buildings to better understand how the building is performing.
This provides building owners, managers, and occupants, and in some cases government staff, information and insights to identify potential problem areas and focus efforts and resources on the best interventions to become more efficient, less costly, and less polluting.
Building Benchmark BC
In 2019, City of Surrey became a founding member of Building Benchmark BC, a voluntary program that helps us better understand the climate impacts of large buildings and develop effective ways to address them.
Building Benchmark BC is a pilot initiative of local governments convened by the OPEN Green Building Society, made possible with support from Natural Resources Canada, Real Estate Foundation of BC, and BC Hydro. Around 700 buildings were benchmarked in 2020 and the program team is looking to double that in 2021.
Learn more about the first year’s successes in the Building Benchmark BC Annual Report.
The program has been extended for a third year (into 2022), highlighting the success of the pilot so far and the important role benchmarking plays in tackling climate change.
Our Progress
In 2020, 44 buildings in Surrey participated in the Building Benchmark BC program. The majority of these are municipal facilities.
In 2021, we want to double the number of participating municipal facilities and increase the participation of privately-owned buildings.
To interact with the Building Benchmark BC database and learn how hundreds of buildings in the lower mainland perform on various energy and carbon metrics, visit buildingbenchmarkbc.ca/data.