Community Energy and Emissions Plan

Supporting and encouraging industrial efforts to decarbonize is key to achieving the City’s targets. This means encouraging businesses and industry groups to adopt organizational netzero targets, tracking progress towards those targets, connecting industry with resources, and engaging other levels of government for support. This includes establishing a net-zero working group for local industry stakeholders, and the creation of a cleantech accelerator to expedite low-carbon technology development and increase industry access to upcoming technology.

For the steel industry, it will mean switching from coal to emission-free alternatives, like sustainably sourced biochar or green hydrogen. For other industries, the focus will be on improving energy efficiency using new and emerging technologies and fuel-switching to clean energy sources.

By 2050 in the BAP scenario, residential and commercial buildings are projected to represent the second largest source of emissions in Hamilton, primarily from the use of natural gas for space and water heating, particularly in older, more inefficient homes.

This plan features a comprehensive energy efficiency and fuel switching building retrofit program. This fuel switching will primarily serve to replace natural gas furnaces with electric heat pumps. The program will aim to cover most of the City of Hamilton by 2050. This plan also recommends partnering with local institutions, labour associations, and not-for-profits to ensure that appropriate education and training programs are in place to prepare the labour force for the proposed mass building retrofits.

This plan will also recommend the creation of comprehensive sustainable building and development guidelines, which will help increase the energy efficiency and decrease the GHG impact of new development. There are various examples of such guidelines throughout Ontario. This will also limit the need for new buildings to be retrofitted in the future.

Closely following buildings, fossil-fuel combustion in cars, trucks, and buses are estimated to account for about 19% of the City’s GHG emissions in 2016, and decline slightly to 17% of Hamilton’s emissions in a BAP scenario by 2050.

To achieve net-zero in this sector, the City will play a key role: expanding active transportation, e-mobility and transit networks, decarbonizing their fleet and transit, and by ensuring the City is designed to support electric vehicle adoption by creating a City-wide EV Strategy that will provide a comprehensive overview of how the City can support the uptake of EVs and encourage the private sector to do so as well. The City and it’s partners will also work with commercial fleet owners to form a community of best practice to share information, support the setting of fleet net-zero targets, track progress towards them, and help connect businesses with resources.

ReCharge Hamilton prioritizes maximizing energy efficiency. Then, the plan relies on fuel switching away from gasoline, diesel, coal, and natural gas to renewable electricity, renewable natural gas, and green hydrogen to achieve net-zero emissions.

Where possible, the production of local renewable electricity is best, as it helps support local economic development and energy independence. Hamilton has access to a wealth of untapped energy and renewable energy resources. For example, the low-carbon model includes:

• Industrial residual heat;
• Rooftop and ground mount solar energy;
• Wind; and
• Biogas from the decomposition of household organic waste. These combine to meet about 7% of the City’s energy needs. Additional renewable energy capacity is available, for example from large-scale wind (inside or outside the City boundaries) along with agricultural and institutional organic waste.

This plan recommends a review of planning and regulatory documents to remove regulatory and policy barriers to the establishment of renewable energy projects, while also encouraging innovative, local ownership structures for these projects. ReCharge Hamilton will also recommend that the City, with its partners, further investigate renewable sources of energy, such as those originating from industrial residual heat, household organics and green hydrogen. This includes exploring the creation of a “hydrogen hub” in Hamilton.

This plan proposes to plant 50,000 trees per year across the entire community, Including efforts from the City, local Conservation Authorities, the general public and the private and not-for-profit sectors. The City will also ensure it’s land use planning policies and regulations preserve the City’s existing tree canopy cover wherever possible.

Survey data was collected between June and December of 2020 to help identify the low-carbon actions that could be taken to assist the City of Hamilton in achieving its target of net-zero emissions by 2050. These surveys also told us about what is important to you when considering  low-carbon actions. Review a brief summary of the survey results(PDF, 171.49 KB)

The feedback from the surveys helped identify and prioritize proposed low-carbon actions. 

Virtual Information Meeting #2 - June 29, 2022

• Meeting 2 Presentation(PDF, 2.96 MB)
• Meeting 2 Video
• Meeting 2 Feedback Report(PDF, 1.26 MB)

Virtual Information Meeting #1 - January 28, 2021

• Meeting 1 Presentation(PDF, 1.89 MB)
• Meeting 1 Video
• Q&A Summary(PDF, 319.4 KB)

The Stakeholder Advisory Committee (SAC) is a non-political advisory body with a mandate to provide a forum for feedback, guidance and advice to the City Staff Project Team and Consultant Team at key points during the process of developing the Community Energy and Emissions Plan. To date, the City Staff Project Team has met twice with the Stakeholder Advisory Committee.