June 18, 2024 Medicine Hat, Alberta Natural Resources Canada
Home retrofits can create good jobs while helping Canadians make their homes more energy efficient, allowing them to tackle climate change, and reduce monthly bills.
Today, the Honourable Jonathan Wilkinson, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, and Geoff Stewart, President of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), announced an investment of $5.4 million (a $1,807,052 million grant and a $3,618,912 million loan) through the Green Municipal Fund's Community Efficiency Financing (CEF) program to support the implementation of a Clean Energy Improvement Program to help homeowners in the City of Medicine Hat finance home energy upgrades.
The program will use property assessed clean energy financing to secure loans of up to $50,000 for homeowners and provide coaching services to help them plan energy-efficient upgrades and renewable energy installations such as smart thermostats, heat pumps, and high-efficiency furnaces and boilers. Upgrades like this help reduce home cooling and heating loads, which increase efficiency and help lower utility costs.
The program expects to support 258 retrofits, leading to a total energy use reduction of more than 7,300 gigajoules, equivalent to the total energy use of 71 homes for one year. In addition, these retrofits will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 950 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year while also creating about 80 direct and indirect jobs. The program will be co-managed by Alberta Municipalities, the centralized program administrator for all the Clean Energy Improvement Programs across the province.
CEF, established in 2020, has supported municipalities in experimenting with new ways to assist homeowners with energy efficiency improvements that boost local employment and the economy.
Established as part of the Budget 2019 investment of $950 million, CEF is one of the ways GMF continues to build on its long record of supporting transformative environmental initiatives at the community level. GMF, administered by FCM, is funded through an endowment by the Government of Canada. Partnerships like this are helping Canada build cleaner, safer communities, reach its climate targets, and lower monthly costs for homeowners.
