Is it worth auditing every site in a retail portfolio?

Usually not. A normalized consumption comparison across the estate — per square foot, adjusted for format, hours and climate — identifies the outliers for a fraction of the cost, and the findings from auditing those outliers typically transfer across similar sites.

Can supermarkets be ENERGY STAR certified in Canada?

Supermarkets are among the 16 currently eligible building types, requiring a score of 75 or higher and a Licensed Professional site visit and sign-off. Restaurants are listed as coming soon.

Retail & Hospitality Energy Audit | Hotels, Stores

Retail and Hospitality Energy Audits

This sector has a structural feature the others do not: many small buildings rather than one large one. That changes the right approach completely — the value is in screening a portfolio to find where consumption diverges from the mean, then auditing the outliers, rather than auditing every site at the same depth.

Where the load sits

Refrigeration, in anything selling food. Usually the largest electrical load in a supermarket or convenience format, and responsive to controls, door and case measures, defrost strategy and heat recovery long before compressor replacement.
Commercial kitchen make-up air. Exhaust hoods move enormous volumes of conditioned air, often at full speed regardless of cooking load. Demand-controlled kitchen ventilation is among the better paybacks in hospitality.
Guest room conditioning in hotels, where occupancy varies nightly and setback on unsold rooms is frequently absent.
Domestic hot water and laundry in hospitality — continuous, gas-fired, and rarely examined.
Retail lighting, where display requirements constrain what is possible, and where controls matter more than lamp choice.
Air curtains and entrance losses on high-traffic doors. Named on Enbridge's eligible equipment list.

What applies

Obligations and funding — verified 3 October 2026
Item	Relevance
ENERGY STAR certification	Retail stores, supermarkets, hotels and banks are eligible types. Restaurants are listed as coming soon.
Ontario EWRB / Toronto	Most single retail units fall below 50,000 sq ft today. Toronto's threshold drops to 10,000 sq ft starting 2027 per the City's page, which brings a large part of this sector into scope for the first time.
IESO Retrofit Program — prescriptive	The right route for multi-site rollouts of identical measures. Terms changed 30 June 2026.
Enbridge prescriptive equipment	Air curtains, demand control ventilation, ERV/HRV and adaptive thermostats among named equipment.
IESO Instant Discounts	Low-friction route for small-site measures.

Screen the portfolio before auditing anything

With twenty similar sites, the cheapest first engagement is not an audit — it is a normalized comparison. Consumption per square foot, adjusted for format, hours and climate, ranked. The sites two standard deviations above the mean almost always have something specific and fixable, and the ranking costs a fraction of a single site audit. Then audit the outliers and roll the findings across the estate.

The 2027 Toronto question

If the City's threshold drops to 10,000 square feet as its own page states, a large share of urban retail and restaurant premises enters mandatory reporting for the first time — owners who have never used Portfolio Manager, on sites where utility accounts often sit with the tenant. A benchmarking submission reports a full calendar year, so the account and meter work has to be in place before that year begins. See what is coming in Toronto.

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.

Retail and Hospitality Energy Audits

Where the load sits

What applies

The 2027 Toronto question

Where to go next

Tell us what is driving the decision