Can an office building be ENERGY STAR certified in Canada?

Yes. Offices are among the 16 currently eligible building types. The building needs an ENERGY STAR score of 75 or higher from twelve months of metered consumption, and a Licensed Professional must conduct a site visit and sign the application before submission to Natural Resources Canada.

Our office is half empty since hybrid working. Does that change the audit?

It changes the findings substantially. Plant scheduling, ventilation rates, staging and reset strategies written for pre-2020 occupancy are frequently the largest recoverable saving in an office today, and they are operational rather than capital.

Office Building Energy Audit | Toronto & Ontario

Office Building Energy Audits

Offices are the best-benchmarked building type in Canada and the one where the gap between a good building and an average one is most visible, because ENERGY STAR scores offices and the whole market can see the number. They are also the type where occupancy has changed most since 2020, and where plant is still running for a building that no longer exists.

Where office energy actually goes

Central plant operating for full occupancy in a building running at sixty percent. Schedules, staging and reset strategies written for 2019 occupancy are the single most common finding we expect in this sector.
Simultaneous heating and cooling — reheat, perimeter heating fighting central cooling, zones at war. Expensive, invisible and usually a sequence problem rather than an equipment problem.
Ventilation rates against actual occupancy, where demand-controlled ventilation is viable and frequently absent.
Base load that never stops — overnight and weekend consumption that reveals what is running when nobody is in the building. The first chart we look at.
Tenant plug and server load, which the landlord cannot control but must report.

What applies

Obligations and funding — verified 3 October 2026
Item	Relevance
Ontario EWRB and City of Toronto reporting	At 50,000 sq ft; Toronto drops to 10,000 sq ft starting 2027 per the City's page. Two deadlines, one Portfolio Manager account.
ENERGY STAR certification	Offices are an eligible type. Score of 75 or higher, Licensed Professional sign-off. Detail.
IESO EBCx	Strong fit. Most office findings are sequence and schedule corrections — exactly what this programme funds.
IESO Peak Performance Program	Commercial and institutional HVAC load reduction at peak.
BOMA Enspire / deep retrofit	Aimed at Class B and C buildings. Detail.

The overnight chart

Ask for one thing before you commission anything: a plot of your building's consumption across a full week, hour by hour. If the overnight and weekend floor is a large fraction of the weekday peak, you are heating, cooling and ventilating an empty building, and the fix is usually settings rather than equipment. It is the cheapest diagnostic in this sector and it is free if you have interval data.

The tenant-metering problem

Office landlords are required to report whole-building consumption while controlling only part of it. Where tenants hold their own accounts, whole-building data has to be assembled through utility aggregation, tenant consent, or lease provisions requiring data sharing. The practical answer is to fix the lease at renewal and aggregate in the meantime — and to stop treating the reporting obligation as a data problem to be solved each June. See EWRB reporting.

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.

Office Building Energy Audits

Where office energy actually goes

What applies

The tenant-metering problem

Where to go next

Tell us what is driving the decision