January 20, 2026  |  12:00 PM to 1:00 PM
WebEx
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JANUARY REGISTRATION NOW OPEN! - PDH Pending

Early-bird registration will close on 1/13/2025.

Join us for our Virtual Meeting on Tuesday, 20TH at WebEx.

K. William (Bill) Dean, P.Eng, will be presenting on:

An Owner's Perspective On Building Decarbonization

• SPEAKER:

• K. William (Bill) Dean, P.Eng
• Bio:

• Bill began his career after graduating in Mechanical Engineering doing HVAC consulting with a Saskatoon based Mechanical Engineering firm that completed many high-profile projects. Bill worked as a junior engineer on assignments that included Veterinary Infectious Diseases Organization and the University Hospital.

The opportunity to start his own consulting engineering firm took Bill into a new and varied direction. Bill worked on small and medium sized projects ($250K to $10M) in western Canada. Bill had a wide variety of clients that included Architects, Interior Designers, Engineers, Contractors and Building Owners. Through this experience Bill became very well versed in a variety of building types, mechanical system applications and energy management approaches.

An opportunity to join a larger engineering firm presented itself in 1988 and Bill became the Chief Mechanical Engineer with a primarily Civil Engineering firm. In that role Bill was able to bring along many of his established clients as well as work on larger civil engineering projects like water treatment plants and sewage treatment plants.

Bill recognized that good engineering design was an iterative process with the lessons-learned and improvements made being applied to the next project not the last ones. In 1991 the National Research Council of Canada’s Plant Biotechnology Institute (NRC/PBI) was looking for a Facility Manager. Bill recognized that this could be the type of opportunity that he was looking for where he could live with a building and make the iterative improvements to optimize the operations of that building. The NRC/PBI hired Bill and he began to apply his experience in building design and energy efficiency to that Facility. It was quickly evident that a substantial portion of the building’s energy consumption was related to the Plant Growth Facilities located in the main campus building and the Greenhouses located at Innovation Place. Bill was able to design and implement system modification to increase the efficiency of the mechanical and electrical systems that service the laboratory building while also improving the performance of the plant growth units. During his years with NRC/PBI Bill was part of the Management team and interacted with the senior scientists and senior managers from all across Canada.

In 1999 Bill was part of an NRC/PBI team that successfully procured federal and provincial grant funding to supplement NRC capital funds to build an Industry Partnership Facility. Key features of that addition included consolidation of all of NRC’s environment growth units into a single phytotron, a future rooftop greenhouse, biotechnology labs including technology service groups (DNA Services, Mass Spec and Bioinformatics) and building systems to optimize energy consumption in a 7000 m2 expansion. Bill was engaged in the design of the building including learning best practices from leaders in the international scientific community. He traveled extensively in North America to observe best practices for laboratory facilities in both the private and public sectors. The NRC building continues to be a leader in the application of innovative solutions to laboratory facilities.

The Property Management team at NRC was reorganized in 2012 and Bill became a Regional Manager in charge of all laboratory facilities in Western Canada. This included big science sites from Astronomy to Nanotechnology. Bill attributes his ASHRAE leadership activities in preparing him for the role of motivating and supervising professionals remotely and ensuring that they communicate with their local leaders and the central management team.

• PRESENTATION:

• An Owner's Perspective On Building Decarbonization
• 95% of all buildings that will exist in 2030 are already in existence and most were not built to meet the more stringent greenhouse gas emissions targets that political leaders are supporting after COP26. We know what we need to design to make buildings better. This Presentation will cover the financial, environmental, political, and operational pressures being faced by the owners of our existing building stock and how can ASHRAE members can respond to their needs more effectively.

• AGENDA:

• 12:00 - 1: Presentation and Q&A

• Questions?

• Contact - Dylan Silvanic ([email protected])