Consequences of the BC Energy Step Code on Offsite Construction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada, off-site construction is still the exception rather than the norm when it comes to wood construction. In Europe’s Alpine Region or Scandinavian countries, off-site construction is standard when it comes to wood construction. This paper will focus on the reasons why Canada’s wood construction industry will shift from mainly on-site to mainly off-site construction over the next 10 to 15 years. In countries with relatively demanding requirements on energy efficiency and air tightness, off-site construction has been dominating the market for more than 20 years. British Columbia adopted the BC Energy Step Code in 2017, a roadmap defining the energy efficiency of buildings over the coming years leading up to 2032, when all new construction will be required to be Net Zero ready. It is expected that the National Building Code of Canada will also encourage higher energy performance levels in the near future. Consequently, thermally better-performing envelopes will have to be produced and rigorous air tightness levels will have to be achieved for the sustainability goals given by the province. Envelope assemblies will get thicker, bulkier and heavier to meet these requirements. In this regard, a market shift to a greater amount of off-site construction is likely to be experienced to meet these targets in a controlled environment. This study is exploring the direct and indirect connections between sustainability and energy efficiency requirements given by codes to technical and cost-efficient solutions offered by industry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".