Municipal Retrofit Strategies for the City of Airdrie
Goal
To develop a building diagnostics strategy to systematically rank Airdrie's portfolio and focus analysis where it has the greatest impact, and to deploy digital twin simulations of priority buildings to compare retrofit scenarios, enabling evidence-based investment decisions and a cost-effective path toward decarbonization.
Description
Airdrie is a mid-sized city of approximately 86,000 residents located in Alberta, Canada, north of Calgary along the Calgary–Edmonton Corridor. The city's growth and urban development make it an increasingly relevant actor in regional sustainability efforts, and its leadership has set an ambitious course toward significantly reducing the carbon footprint of its municipal operations.
At the heart of this initiative is the City of Airdrie's decarbonization plan, driven by its Energy Management Steering Group. The group seeks to develop a thorough understanding of energy consumption patterns across its portfolio of corporate buildings and to identify which facilities would benefit most from energy efficiency retrofits. The challenge, however, lies in the scale: conducting in-depth individual analyses of every building would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming using conventional consultancy approaches.
To address this challenge, the city partnered with the Next-Generation Cities Institute (NGCI) at Concordia University. This methodology — grounded in the PRISM method and enhanced through the digital twinning capabilities of the TOOLS4Cities framework — enables rapid, data-driven prioritization of buildings based on their emissions performance and retrofit potential. The approach has already been validated with large asset owners in Montréal, including the city's facility management and social housing departments.
Budget: $15 000 CAD
Timeline: January - June 2026
Findings
Airdrie's municipal buildings vary widely in retrofit potential depending on their function and fuel mix: heat-pump retrofits cut energy use by roughly 15–16% in gas-heated vehicle garages but 31–57% in occupied spaces, with carbon savings largest where electric-resistance heating (like public washrooms) is replaced by heat pumps and more modest where natural gas is offset by added electricity use. The calibrated digital energy models produced give Airdrie a data-driven way to test retrofit scenarios before committing to costed implementation decisions. Future implementation of diagnostic tools like heat maps and PRISM analysis will let the city screen its building portfolio to flag unusual energy performance and prioritize which facilities (e.g., fire stations with high heating sensitivity) and warrant deeper investigation.
Our team
- Prof. Ursula Eicker, Canada Excellence Research Chair Laureate in Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Communities and Cities, and Founding Director of NGCI, Scientific director
- Oriol Gavaldà, Manager, Research and Innovation Programs, NGCI, Project coordinator
Research collaborators:
- Murad Alhawahry, PhD student, NGCI
