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BOMA Enspire Deep Retrofit Assessments

EnerSolution Inc. is a certified BOMA Enspire Service Provider. The program exists to move Class B and C commercial buildings — the ones that rarely qualify for flagship retrofit funding — into deep, financeable retrofit projects.

The buildings this exists for

Canada's carbon problem in commercial real estate is not concentrated in new towers. It sits in the mid-tier — Class B and C buildings, often thirty to sixty years old, frequently multi-tenant, usually owned by parties without a dedicated sustainability team or a deep capital pool.

These buildings hold the largest absolute reduction opportunity in the country and have historically had the least access to funding, because flagship programs tend to reward owners who were already investing. BOMA Enspire was created to address precisely that gap.

What the program is

BOMA Enspire is run by BOMA Canada and funded through Natural Resources Canada's Deep Retrofit Accelerator Initiative. It supports building owners through the process of scoping, planning and financing a deep retrofit — not a single measure, but a coordinated programme intended to move a building's performance substantially.

Work is delivered through certified Service Providers. EnerSolution Inc. is certified, which means we can take a building through the program's assessment process directly rather than referring you elsewhere.

Why "deep" matters

A deep retrofit is not a lighting upgrade. It is a coordinated set of measures — envelope, mechanical, controls and often fuel switching — planned together so their interactions work in your favour rather than against you.

Done measure by measure, you replace a boiler sized for a building you are about to insulate. Done together, the mechanical plant gets smaller, cheaper and more efficient because the load came down first. That sequencing is the whole point.

What an Enspire engagement involves

  1. Eligibility and scoping — confirming the building fits, and what the owner is trying to achieve.
  2. Building assessment — energy and emissions baseline, system condition, and the technical opportunity.
  3. Retrofit pathway development — measures grouped and sequenced, with costs, savings and carbon reduction modelled as a programme rather than a list.
  4. Financial structuring — what it costs, what the programme contributes, what other funding routes apply, and how the remainder is financed.
  5. Implementation planning — phasing that fits the building's capital cycle, tenancy and operations.

How it fits with other funding

An Enspire pathway is not exclusive of other programs. Individual measures within a deep retrofit may still be eligible for Save on Energy Retrofit incentives, Enbridge commercial custom funding, or the federal Clean Technology Investment Tax Credit on solar and storage. Canada Infrastructure Bank financing may apply to the capital.

Assembling that stack correctly — and in the right order, since some programs require pre-approval before work begins — is a significant part of the value. It is also where projects most often lose money they were entitled to.

Where to start

Most owners come to Enspire from one of two directions: a benchmarking result that showed the building performing poorly against its peers, or a capital planning exercise that surfaced several major systems reaching end of life at once.

The second is the better trigger. When mechanical plant is due for replacement anyway, the incremental cost of replacing it with something substantially better is a fraction of the full capital cost — and that is when a deep retrofit is cheapest it will ever be.

Related

Where to go next

Request a proposal

Tell us what is driving the decision

A compliance deadline, an incentive application, a financing requirement, or a capital plan. Tell us which, and we will tell you what you need and what it will cost — as a fixed fee, before any work starts.

If you do not need an audit, we will say so.