“I am scared that we are inviting a complete political showdown” about the issue in the weeks leading up to the May 24 meeting, said Gibson. He was the lone vote against sending the GEERS issue to that meeting.

Last year, city staff proposed a rapid ramp-up of a GEERS program, which would allow Guelph homeowners to get energy-efficiency retrofits done in a simplified way, while paying for the retrofits over 20 years on the same bill as their city taxes. The obligation to pay for the retrofits in this way would be assumed by any later purchaser of the house. The idea is that the total payments would be less than the energy cost savings, benefitting homeowners and also addressing the city’s Community Energy Initiative goals to reduce carbon emissions linked to climate change.

The new staff report, though, proposes a go-slow approach to GEERS. It recommends the city first do a small-scale pilot project, which wouldn’t be funded until the city’s 2018 budget is approved.

Rob Kerr, the city’s manager of community energy, noted that the provincial and federal governments are showing interest in energy-efficiency programs based on the same innovation as GEERS – namely, the use of local improvement charges to get the cost of energy-efficiency renovations paid on tax bills. He said this interest could lead to financial support from senior governments for programs like GEERS.

Gibson said he hoped a GEERS program in Guelph would help homeowners with the substantial cost of updating their electrical systems to allow for charging of vehicles powered by electricity. Kerr said he suspected this would be allowable.

“I am trying to get to a ‘yes’ on this,” Guthrie said about a GEERS pilot project, but he didn’t like the proposal made in the new report. “It still seems complicated to me,” he said.

“I’m not comfortable with the direction the report was going to take us,” said Coun. Bob Bell, the committee’s chair. “I just don’t like the proposed solution.”

In the new report, staff ask council to authorize continued development of a GEERS pilot project, which would involve perhaps 20 Guelph homes. The pilot could either focus on a standard retrofit package of such things as insulation, heating and triple-glazed windows, or it could be simplified through an exclusive focus on rooftop solar photovoltaic systems, the report says.

The city’s goal with GEERS has been to have much of the program delivery handled by a third party, such as eMerge Guelph, a local not-for-profit energy-efficiency organization. However, eMerge doesn’t want to be involved in a small-scale pilot, and beginning with a small GEERS pilot could also affect other factors such as availability of financing.

Halifax focused exclusively on solar thermal heating when it launched its own pilot a few years ago for a GEERS-like program, but Kerr told the committee there are good reasons to take a broader approach in Guelph.

Guelph’s Community Energy Initiative sets ambitious energy-efficiency targets, he said, and “solar really isn’t about building efficiency at all” but rather is about renewable energy generation.

Another reason for a broader approach, entailing a wider range of energy-efficiency renovations, is that the “economic impact is much more profound” in terms of creating local work for trades people, he said.

And, said Kerr, the current solar power model in Ontario is related to a provincial program, involving relatively high payments for solar-generated electricity, that may not last. There are “already signs it is going to be ‘sunset’ pretty soon,” he said.