Toronto, Canada (GLOBE-Net) - A third component of the federal government’s ecoENERGY program has been revealed with the announcement of a $300 million investment over four years to encourage the energy efficient construction and retrofitting of homes, buildings, and industrial processes.

Minister of Natural Resources Gary Lunn made the announcement at the Metro Home Show in Toronto, repeating his previous statement that “the largest untapped source of energy is the energy we waste.”

According to Natural Resources Canada, the more than 13 million homes and 380,000 buildings in the country use 30 percent of our energy supply and generate the same percentage of our national greenhouse gas emissions.

The ecoENERGY Efficiency Initiative is made up of three components:

• A $220-million ecoENERGY Retrofit program to offer homeowners, smaller businesses, and other organizations support and information to retrofit their homes, buildings and industrial processes.

  
  Under the program, homeowners who invest in an energy audit and energy efficiency improvements to their home may receive a payment of up to $5,000. The government expects the Retrofit program to result in efficiency upgrades for around 140,000 Canadian households and around 800 smaller organizations. For homeowners, the average grant is expected to be more than $1,000 and to yield an average 30 percent reduction in energy use and costs.

  
  

• The $60-million ecoENERGY for Buildings and Houses fund will provide ancillary support to encourage energy efficient construction.

  
  The program will invest in new design tools to increase awareness of best practices and new technologies in the building sector. House and building energy rating and labelling systems will also be developed. The federal government also will encourage provincial and territorial governments to adopt more stringent building energy codes.

  
  

• The $20-million ecoENERGY for Industry program will be put towards the exchange of best practices information and training to improve energy efficiency in the industrial sector. The government will also share the costs of assessments to identify energy efficiency investments.

Program details, including information about how to apply for grants, are to be available when the program starts in April 2007. A new ecoEnergy website has been created to provide details on this latest series of announcements and policies. Energy efficiency was also targeted with amendments to the Energy Efficiency Act proposed in the Clean Air Act last fall. The legislation will set minimum energy performance standards for a series of new products, including traffic signals, commercial boilers, and large air conditioners. Existing standards for products including dishwashers, refrigerators, and gas furnaces, will be made more stringent.

Other ecoEnergy initiatives announced over the past week include a $230 million fund to promote the development and demonstration of clean-energy technologies, including clean coal and carbon capture

See: Climate plan: clean energy funding

Also announced were $1.5 billion in incentives over 14 years to support renewable energy technologies such as wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, small hydro and ocean energy.

See: $1.5B for renewable incentives