In February of this year Bill 150 the Green Energy and Green Economy Act was introduced in the Ontario Legislature.
The objective of the bill is to foster the development of renewable energy, a decentralized energy grid energy, creating jobs, and supporting Ontario's climate change goals. The Bill is intended to provide lower cost, cleaner, renewable power to Ontarians. The cost savings are estimated to be between 11% and 32%, compared to conventional power sources. The executive summary for Bill 150 cites a Moody’s Investment Services report from May 2008 which says that while the costs of traditional generating technologies are rising rapidly, green generating technologies are showing increasingly better efficiency in energy conversion to electricity and decreasing costs. By 2015, the objective is to deliver among other things 10,000 MW of new installed renewable energy, 1,500 MW of new installed Combined Heat and Power (CHP), and 6,300 MW of conservation (compared to 2007 levels).
But also in the Green Energy Act is a real sleeper, a provision that will require sellers of real estate to provide energy efficiency information 
about the building being sold and which may require an energy audit. The nearest equivalent of which I am aware is the Code for Sustainable Homes (CSH) that is mandatory for new homes in the UK since May, 2008. CSH requires a report on nine areas of sustainability including energy use and water consumption with six possible levels. The highest level is carbon neutral. The interesting thing is that CSH is working its way into the building code in the UK. I would expect that the Ontario equivalent is going to have similar far reaching implications. What both of these measures mean is that when you are looking to buy a home you will be able to compare the energy efficiency of different houses on a standard scale.
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