District of Shelburne Administration Building Facilities Renewal Needs Analysis and Feasibility Study

The Municipality of the District of Shelburne aimed to use full energy accounting (including energy used during construction) to compare the life-cycle costs and sustainability of two options for bringing its Municipal Administration Building (MAB) to LEED Silver standard. The options were adaptive reuse of all or part of the current facility, with additional ground floor space at the current location, or construction of a new facility within municipal boundaries. This study linked directly to the municipality’s Integrated Community Sustainability Plan, which had identified facilities renewal as an important way to reduce the municipality’s energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The municipality had already completed an energy and GHG inventory and a detailed energy audit of the MAB. This 1902-vintage building, with a more modern addition, consumed 234,000 kilowatt hours of energy annually. This cost $24,520 and produced an average of 203 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents a year — 59 per cent of which was allocated to heating. A new or retrofitted building was expected to generate energy savings of at least 50 per cent. This would free funds for investment in the local community, and also deal with significant concerns about workspace quality, functionality, and building layout. Engagement with stakeholders and consideration by municipal council had narrowed the study’s options to two. Although neither option was likely to address every identified need, a process to evaluate and prioritize all anticipated costs and needs would ensure a combination of the best fit with the best value. As a case study for other rural municipalities across Canada, this project aimed to show how full energy accounting could be used to evaluate the total energy impact of retrofitting or replacing buildings originally designed for a world in which energy was cheap and plentiful.

(Project description from original funding application)