What is a commercial energy audit?

A structured assessment of how a commercial building uses energy, what it costs, and which improvements are worth making. Conducted to ANSI/ASHRAE/ACCA Standard 211, which defines the scope, analysis and report outline at each of three levels.

How much can a commercial energy audit save?

It depends entirely on the building. Typical identified savings in Canadian commercial buildings run from a few percent in a well-run modern facility to well over twenty percent in an older building with drifted controls. The audit's job is to tell you your number, not an industry average.

Do we need an audit to get an incentive?

For prescriptive incentives, often not. For custom incentives — which are where the larger sums are — yes. Save on Energy Custom projects and Enbridge commercial custom projects both require detailed savings calculations and measurement and verification.

Commercial Energy Audit Ontario & Canada

What the audit is for

Very few owners commission an audit out of curiosity. There is almost always a trigger: a reporting deadline, an incentive application with a closing date, a lender asking questions, equipment approaching end of life, or a utility bill that stopped making sense.

Each trigger needs a different depth of work, and matching them is the single most consequential decision in the engagement. A walk-through will not support a custom incentive application. An investment-grade study is money wasted if all you needed was a benchmark. We start by asking what decision you are trying to make.

What we assess

Systems covered in a Level 2 commercial audit
System	What we look at
Envelope	Wall and roof assembly, insulation, glazing, thermal bridging, observed infiltration
Heating	Plant type, efficiency, age, sequencing, turndown, reset strategy, distribution losses
Cooling	Plant, efficiency, refrigerant, staging, chilled water reset, condenser condition
Air distribution	Air handler inventory, fan control, static pressure, economizer function, terminal units
Ventilation	Outdoor air rates against design and code, demand control, heat recovery
Lighting	Fixture inventory by space, installed watts per square foot, controls, daylight harvesting, exterior
Controls	BAS age and points, actual sequences against documented, override history
Hot water & process	Domestic hot water, recirculation, kitchen, refrigeration, elevators, IT rooms

The finding owners least expect

In buildings older than about ten years, the documented sequence of operation and what the building actually does are rarely the same thing. Trend data routinely shows air handlers running hours past the published schedule, economizers stuck closed, and setpoints overridden years ago by somebody who has since left.

These cost real money, they cost almost nothing to fix, and they do not appear in a walk-through. They appear when somebody trends the controls.

Building types we work in

School boards — multi-site portfolios where one measure repeats across dozens of buildings, and where capital cycles and procurement rules shape what is possible
Places of worship — large volumes, intermittent occupancy, older envelopes, constrained budgets
High-rise residential — EWRB reporting obligations, MLI Select financing, rising common-area costs
Municipal and institutional — formal procurement, capital planning cycles, public reporting
Office, retail and warehousing — single buildings and portfolios, including tenant-metered structures
Healthcare and mixed use

What you receive

An energy and emissions baseline, weather-normalized, broken down by end use
Benchmarking against comparable buildings, with the comparison source named
Measures ranked by payback, each with installed cost, annual savings, and the incentive available against it
A measurement and verification plan, because most funders require savings to be proven
An implementation sequence, so measures happen in an order that does not undo each other
Documentation formatted for the programs you are applying to

How we quote

Fixed fee, agreed before any work starts. No hourly billing and no scope creep. The fee depends on three things: the level of audit, the size and complexity of the building, and how much usable data already exists.

That last one is worth understanding, because it is the one you control. A building with 24 months of utility data, drawings and an equipment list costs materially less to audit than one where all of that has to be reconstructed. If you have it, the quote reflects that. If you do not, we can help assemble it.

Commercial Energy Audits