If you’re not sure what TEUI3 is, Take me to the Index of Articles!
TEUI3 provides a Drop-Down menu to select a year range from 2015 to 2041. The purpose of this is to establish in what year annual emissions are to be calculated for, and this can function for either the ‘Utility Bill‘ method or the ‘Targeted Use‘ method if a project is still in design. When a user selects the Reporting Period Year, TEUI3 calculates the Annualized Emissions from data shared with us by the Toronto Atmospheric Fund’s reporting: https://taf.ca/publications/ontario-electricity-emissions-factors-2024/. TEUI 3 applies this data from the Worksheet titled ‘Ontario Emissions‘ and contains historical data from 2015 and projections based on IESO (Independent Electricity Systems Operator) modelling data to the year 2041.
So once you have defined general building parameters, and you have selected the Reporting Year, you will see the automatic adjustment to annual emissions intensity and lifetime carbon emissions intensity update in both the ‘Utility Bill‘ method and the ‘Targeted Use‘ method’s cells in the header.
Carbon Tax: We also added a section that calculates the Federal Carbon Tax on both construction material emissions (Embodied Carbon) and Operational Emissions, which appears under ‘C.1 Carbon Tax Rate’ at line 11 of the tool. This multiplies the rate from Cell L12, based on the Reporting Year set by the user, in accordance with the escalation schedule for the Carbon Tax up to 2030, beyond 2030 it’s anyone’s guess where this political football will land.
The reporting period line also contains a cell where Building Service Life is selected. This is not intended to suggest a building will only exist or be useful for that period (30-100 years), but this setting allows TEUI to calculate the ‘Lifetime Carbon’ in accordance with the methodology emergent in the European Union member nations, notably Denmark, Sweden, Norway, etc. This selected Building Service Life is acts as a denominator for total Embodied Carbon (A1-A3, Shell and Core), which then adds the Annual Carbon Emissions from building Operation, to derive an annualized total carbon intensity figure, such as the Danish Building Code (BR18)’s upper limit of 12kgCO2e/m2/yr. Based on the S3. Carbon Benchmarking Standard you select, this can be shown as a pass/fail % metric at T.1 Lifetime Carbon. But since Canada does not yet consider such a metric, the reference default simply shows ‘N/A’ for Not Applicable, but for user interest, you can toggle ‘BR18’ in S3 to see how whether your building could in fact meet the Danish Building Code!
In a future version of TEUI3, we may be asked to connect the Building Service Life toggle to a compliance with CSA-S478 (covering durability), but as this is currently a guideline and not a standard per the NBC and OBC, we do not currently reference it in TEUI3.
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