In 2026 the Zero Emissions Innovation Centre, through its Building to Electrification (B2E) Coalition, published British Columbia's Building Electrification Roadmap — a five-year plan, built on input from more than 200 industry contributors, for shifting BC's building stock to high-efficiency electric heating and cooling. The roadmap is not law; it is a set of 30 recommended actions directed mostly at the Province, utilities, and local governments. But it is the clearest published picture of where BC's buildings are headed, and it singles out apartment-style and strata buildings as one of the hardest sub-sectors to electrify. For strata councils, two of its findings land directly on the planning work the Strata Property Act now requires.
What the roadmap says about strata buildings
Apartment-style buildings account for roughly 2% of BC's greenhouse-gas emissions, most of it from burning natural gas in central boilers, rooftop units, and domestic-hot-water systems. The roadmap's authors — who worked with the Vancouver Island Strata Owners Association and Strata Property Agents of BC, among others — identify the obstacles that make these buildings slow to electrify. Two stand out for councils:
- Electrical capacity is the binding constraint. The roadmap states plainly that "the cost of electrical capacity upgrades is a major barrier for many buildings," with upgrades ranging from CAD $500,000 to $2 million. Its recommended response is the same one the EPR process is built around: "active load management strategies are a critical first step to mitigating these costs."
- Strata ownership makes financing hard. Because of their shared-ownership model, the roadmap notes, strata corporations are "severely" limited in their ability to obtain whole-building financing, and what financing exists "includes very high interest rates." It recommends the Province set up a loan guarantee for strata electrification projects — modelled on the guarantees used during BC's "leaky condo" crisis.
Why the capacity finding matters to your council
The roadmap's central message for strata buildings — that electrical capacity, not the heat pumps themselves, is the expensive and decisive variable — is exactly what an Electrical Planning Report exists to measure. An EPR establishes how much spare capacity a building actually has, models the load that electrification (heat pumps, electric domestic hot water, EV charging) would add, and tests whether load-management strategies can free enough capacity to avoid or shrink a service upgrade. When the roadmap calls load management "a critical first step," it is describing the analysis a compliant EPR already performs.
That reframes the EPR for a council. It is not only a Strata Property Act compliance item to be checked off by its regional deadline — it is the document that tells you whether your building faces a $500,000 problem or a manageable one, and which load-management measures change that answer. The roadmap also recommends the Province update the BC and Canadian Electrical Codes to allow more load-management options precisely because they are the cheapest way to defer capacity upgrades. A current EPR puts your council ahead of that curve.
Cooling, heat pumps, and the regulations on the horizon
The roadmap expects demand for in-suite cooling to drive much of the coming electrification, and recommends that wherever a building adds cooling it use heat pumps that both heat and cool. Among its proposed regulations is one requiring permanently installed air conditioners to include a reversing valve, so a unit installed for cooling can also provide heat. These are recommendations to government, not current requirements — but they signal that "we only added air conditioning" will increasingly mean adding heating load too, which again returns to the building's electrical capacity.
The roadmap also flags a fairness question councils should anticipate: when a building moves from centralized heating to in-suite heat pumps, the heating cost that used to sit in strata fees shifts onto individual owners' utility bills, and that reallocation has to be handled transparently. None of this is on next year's agenda for most buildings — but it is the direction the planning a council does today should account for.
What a council can act on now
Most of the roadmap's 30 actions are for governments and utilities, not strata councils. The parts a council can act on are the parts that were already coming:
- Get the capacity picture first. Commission your EPR — required of every BC strata of five or more lots regardless of any electrification plans — and read it as a capacity and load-management study, not just a compliance form.
- Watch the support programs' timelines. The roadmap notes that funding for the strata-focused concierge service (the Strata Energy Advisor) and similar programs is currently set to expire after March 2027. Councils that want that support should not assume it will still be there in a few years.
- Sequence the work. Use the EPR's findings to decide what, if anything, to do — load-management measures, a phased upgrade, or simply a documented plan — at a pace your budget and owner demand set. The report informs the decision; it does not commit you to construction.
How CF Electrical Services fits in
CF Electrical Services is a strata electrical consulting and report-writing firm — we prepare the Electrical Planning Report, EV Ready Plan, and Depreciation Report that BC strata corporations need, and we do not perform installation work, which keeps our recommendations independent of any construction contract. If the roadmap's capacity warning describes your building, the EPR is where a clear-eyed plan starts. See what an Electrical Planning Report contains, or send your building details for a fixed-price proposal.
Written by CF Electrical Services — BC strata electrical consulting (Electrical Planning Reports, EV Ready Plans, and Depreciation Reports).