High-Performance Buildings in Mountain Communities

Author/Contributor: Town of Banff, WSP

Alberta Context: This report was written by WSP for the Town of Banff. The Town of Banff was funded by the Code Acceleration Fund (CAF) to advance the implementation and adoption of high-performance energy codes. This report responds to Banff’s growth in housing development and reflects the town’s commitment to empowering the community and private developers to construct buildings that are both sustainable and efficient. While Banff’s current regulatory framework mandates higher efficiency standards for all new municipal buildings, the Town does not have the authority or the agency to enforce specific building codes.

Summary: 

This project conducts a technical, capital cost, and lifecycle analysis to evaluate the impacts of homes built to meet increasingly strict performance Tiers in the National Building Code – Alberta Edition (NBC AE) and the National Energy Code for Buildings (NECB), with the goal of understanding:

• Analysis of the energy-related features and characteristics for four key residential development archetypes in the Town of Banff, the Bow Valley, and comparable mountain communities. The archetypes under consideration represent a significant portion of new development and include:
  • Fourplexes
  • Garage Suites
  • Low-Rise Apartments
  • Mixed-Use Buildings
• Cost-effective and potential design strategies tailored to the four archetypes that can successfully achieve the required energy performance Tiers.
• The energy performance Tiers for each archetype will be assessed based on their associated greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, and financial implications.
• The financial return on investment is affected by uncertainty in crucial variables, including utility costs, initial construction costs, and non-energy benefits such as reduced maintenance.

The report is intended to support discussion of the challenges and benefits of high-performance buildings in Alberta’s mountain communities. The goal is to provide useful data and discuss the potential opportunities and barriers for owners/developers, occupants, and the broader community in making investments beyond minimum code performance.

This study is not intended to be a prescriptive guide for builders, to define the only pathway to achieving higher performance in new builds, or to indicate the exact costs for each project. The performance and cost of new buildings are heavily influenced by build-specific factors, and this report is intended to support (and ideally simplify and accelerate) investment decision-making, particularly in the early stages.

Findings and conclusions from this report will be further enhanced through engagement with industry leaders and with comparison to real-world data as local projects pursue a beyond-code mandate.

Passive House Alberta and WSP, through the ENBIX Building Better in Alberta webinar series, presented this in a webinar in January 2026; you can watch the recorded session here.