We have made this handy calculator that lets you determine the energy performance of your home or building in the units of the most widely used Building Energy energy metric, the TEUI or Total Energy Use Intensity. The units are the amount of all energy sources in Kilowatt Hours (ekWh – where e stands for equivalent) required as a function of building area in square metres per year: kWh/m2/yr. Simply fill in the fields to the best of your knowledge below and the calculator converts all of the units for you. Conversion references are provided in the footnotes below. Here is what you should expect as a range:

• 1995 Canadian National Household Average: 325 kWh/m2/yr
• 2015 Canadian National Household Average: 203 kWh/m2/yr
• 2019 An Average Ontario House with Eco-conscious users: 130 kWh/m2/yr
• 1996 An Off-Grid R2000 House in Germany: 36 kWh/m2/yr
• 2012 A Passive House Level Building in Quebec: 49 kWh/m2/yr
• 2019 Passive House Requirements: ~90 kWh/yr (15 TEDI + 75PER)

Happy crunching!

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A wee blurb on how this all gets calculated and the references and units used. If you’d like to see a graphic representation of these kinds of results please visit our blog post: https://www.andythomson.ca/2018/11/20/how-many-miles-per-gallon-does-your-building-get/

• Conversion of Natural Gas to Gigajoules (m3 to GJ) multiply m3 by 0.0373 (source: https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy/natural-gas/5641#conversion)
• Conversion of GigaJoules to kWhr (GJ>kWh) multiply GJ by 277 (source: https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy/natural-gas/5641#conversion)
• Conversion of Square Feet to Square Metres: Multiply sf by 10.7639
• Conversion Factor for MTCO2 from m3 of natural Gas (Direct & Inderect) Multiply m3 by 0.00263 (Source: Environment Canada, Emission Factors from Canada’s GHG Inventory. Available at: http://www.ec.gc.ca/ges-ghg/)
• Calculate your Carbon Footprint from Electricity (Ontario only) Multiply kWh by 0.00004 (Source: https://calculator.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx?tab=2)
• Wood heat conversion factor: 1,000kWh/m3 (Source: http://seacourse.dk/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=Calculating+in+KWh)
• Convert GtCarbon to CO2ppm Atmospheric: 1ppm = 7.81GtCO2 and 1ppmCO2a = 2.13Gt unburned carbon. (Sourcehttps://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=45 )
• 2795Gt of Carbon then equates to 1312.2ppmCO2a (‘business as usual’ case scenario per IPCC RCP8.5, 2018)
• *2795Gt is the worst case TOTAL scenario for 5ºC of warming (per ICPP RCP8.5), and 15% of 2795Gt is 419.25Gt CO2 (the percentage attributable globally to buildings). This by the way is an endgame scenario – and would lead to runaway warming. So if everyone lived like me, we’d hit that ceiling in the number of years indicated above. Fortunately for all of us, development does not happen so fast, especially due to climate change itself.
• Canadian Residential Sector Energy Use: http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/corporate/statistics/neud/dpa/showTable.cfm?type=CP&sector=res&juris=ca&rn=1&page=0
• Here we’ve offered a google spreadsheets version of the data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10WEDcHbY-ol8z_Cc4i7pl2BSJ0ErkCnr5WMewINBzR4/edit#gid=1521777170