This paper presents neighbourhood-level energy efficiency planning as a promising approach to accelerating building retrofits in Canada. Although energy efficiency is one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, current retrofit activity remains slow, fragmented, and largely focused on individual buildings. The paper positions neighbourhoods—defined by geographic proximity and shared social connections—as a practical mid-scale that can enable coordinated action across multiple buildings. Through Canadian and international examples, it demonstrates how neighbourhood-scale planning can reduce costs through aggregation, support shared infrastructure and emerging technologies, increase participation through social networks, and better align energy upgrades with local priorities such as affordability, comfort, resilience, and equity.
The paper also outlines key barriers limiting wider adoption of neighbourhood-level approaches, including governance complexity, limited expertise, inadequate data and planning tools, and insufficient funding for demonstration and deployment. In response, it identifies a range of actions that governments, utilities, and non-profits can take to support neighbourhood leadership, such as investing in decision-support tools, improving access to localized data, building technical and community capacity, and enabling flexible, community-scale financing models. Overall, the paper frames neighbourhood-level energy efficiency planning not as a single program, but as a flexible set of strategies already emerging across Canada that could significantly increase the pace and scale of retrofits while delivering broader social and economic benefits.
