Evaluating The City Of Toronto's Home Energy Loan Program. An Investigation Into The Environmental And Economic Impacts Of The Applied Energy Efficiency Retrofits

This research looks at Toronto’s Home Energy Loan Program (HELP) and evaluates the outcomes of this program. HELP is a pilot municipal program that offers a low interest loan to homeowners who are willing to undertake energy efficiency improvements. This program is unique in Toronto in that it is the first and only program that finances energy efficiency through the local improvement charges and allows repaying the loan through an additional charge on the property tax bill. This research aims to evaluate the HELP program in terms of its energy saving and GHG reduction achievements and examines the role of the program in bridging the so-called energy efficiency gap. To get a better and more accurate understanding of the program’s performance, two other energy efficiency programs, namely R.E.E.P and Enbridge HEC were introduced and compared with HELP. More specifically, the paper conducts:

• An impact evaluation, in which the program is evaluated in terms of its natural gas saving, electricity saving, GHG reduction, number of improvements, and Enbridge scores increase.
• An efficiency evaluation, in which a cost-benefit analysis is conducted and the specific NPV, IRR, ROI, total costs, and total benefits of 31 of the HELP projects are calculated. The efficiency evaluation examines the cost-effectiveness of investing in energy efficiency retrofitting through HELP from the homeowners’ point of view. The impact evaluation shows that the HELP program wasn’t able to encourage homeowners to undertake deeper energy efficiency improvements. It also indicates no significant energy saving and GHG reduction achievements for the program, when compared to the other introduced programs. The efficiency evaluation conducted in this research proves that around 71% of the HELP projects were considered cost-effective from the homeowners’ perspective, but had long payback periods. The research finally acknowledges the role of HELP in bridging the barrier of high upfront costs by assisting homeowners who were initially interested in investing in energy efficiency retrofitting. However, the study found no evidence that HELP played a role in promoting energy efficiency retrofitting as a pro-environmental behaviour among homeowners who wouldn’t consider energy retrofitting without the assistance of HELP.