A Government of Prince Edward Island Initiative | September 2025
The Client Challenge
The Province of Prince Edward Island aimed to boost awareness of the financial benefits of home electrification, reduce barriers to retrofits, and increase participation in programs that enhance the affordability, energy use, and climate resilience of PEI homes.
The Goal
To provide PEI residents with a digital portal that builds awareness of household energy performance and offers clear pathways for home upgrades, while also collecting structured user feedback through a survey.
Climative’s Role
To design and build the PEI Home Energy Portal, delivering personalized home upgrade recommendations alongside estimated financial payback, energy savings, and emissions impacts.
Result
Exceptionally high user satisfaction, with 75% of users indicating they are more likely to take retrofit action after using the Portal.
Good to Know:
Prince Edward Island (PEI) is a small Canadian province with a population around 180,000.
From March 2024 to March 2025, the Government of Prince Edward Island’s Department of Environment, Energy and Climate Action partnered with Climative to soft-launch the PEI Home Energy Portal. The initiative emerged directly from the Province’s successful proposal to Natural Resources Canada’s building labelling initiative. The goal was to test whether a digital-first approach could help homeowners better understand – and act on – their home’s energy performance and emissions.
At its core, the Portal aimed to translate complex energy data into an accessible home energy rating and provide residents with clear, customized pathways toward meaningful upgrades that reduce monthly utility costs while improving climate resilience. To evaluate this approach, initial testing and feedback were gathered from a cohort of Government of PEI employees across multiple departments.
This testing phase of the project demonstrated strong user engagement and validated the Portal’s potential to increase energy literacy, break down barriers to home retrofits, and drive participation in programs that make PEI homes more affordable and climate-adapted.
This case study outlines the key findings from the testing phase and presents a clear, data-driven roadmap for future enhancements and broader deployment.
An overwhelming majority of users believe the service would be valuable for homeowners in PEI.
Users gave the platform a high average likelihood-to-recommend score, indicating strong satisfaction.
Over three-quarters of users said a visible energy rating would make them more likely to participate in EfficiencyPEI programs.
Nearly three in four users ranked the “ability to speak with an expert” as a top desired feature for the platform.
More than half of all users reported learning something new about their home’s energy performance or potential upgrades.
Throughout the project, participants were asked to provide feedback at each stage of the PEI Home Energy Portal experience. This structured feedback illuminated how users interacted with the platform, where they found the most value, and where improvements would most effectively enhance clarity, trust, and usability.
These insights informed future Portal recommendations focused on user satisfaction, energy literacy, and boosting EfficiencyPEI program participation.
The PEI Home Energy Portal was grounded in a clearly defined set of objectives articulated in the Province’s submission to NRCan’s Toward Net-Zero Homes and Communities initiative. This phase of the project provided an opportunity to test these objectives in practice, and the results demonstrate a strong alignment between the original vision and measurable outcomes.
Increase Homeowner Engagement
The proposal called for a low-barrier, accessible digital tool to help Islanders understand their home energy performance.
Outcome: Engagement exceeded expectations, with 97% of users finding the service valuable and an average likelihood-to-recommend score of 4.4 out of 5, confirming the Portal’s effectiveness as a homeowner engagement channel.
Enhance Energy Literacy
A central objective was to equip homeowners with personalized, understandable information about energy use and potential savings.
Outcome: The Portal functioned as a meaningful educational resource, with 56% of users reporting they learned something new, ranging from awareness of specific technologies (such as HRVs and water heat recovery) to a better understanding of building envelope improvements.
Drive Participation in Retrofit Programs
The Portal was intended to serve as a bridge between curiosity and action, guiding users toward EfficiencyPEI programs.
Outcome: More than 75% of users indicated that a visible home energy rating would make them more likely to participate in provincial energy efficiency initiatives, highlighting the Portal’s potential to drive real-world uptake.
These results clearly demonstrate that the project achieved its objectives and provide a foundation for province-wide deployment.
The project confirmed a core hypothesis: a well-designed digital tool can meaningfully engage homeowners on complex energy topics. With 97% of users identifying the service as valuable and a strong average recommendation score of 4.4/5, the Portal demonstrated clear product-market fit. User comments reinforced this finding, describing the platform as an effective way to understand a home’s efficiency, whether evaluating a current residence or considering a future purchase. This level of engagement provides a strong foundation for province-wide adoption.
Increasing energy literacy was a key objective, and the Portal succeeded in delivering new insights to users. Over half of the participants reported learning something new about their home’s energy performance. Feedback also identified opportunities to deepen this learning through clearer explanations of technologies and system lifespans, an enhancement that will further support informed homeowner decision-making.
The Portal functioned not only as an informational resource but as an entry point into the retrofit journey. More than 75% of users indicated that a visible home energy rating/score would increase their likelihood of participating in efficiency programs, establishing a direct connection between digital assessment and real-world climate action.
While overall sentiment was positive, the pilot highlighted areas where friction could undermine user confidence, particularly during account creation and verification. Addressing these early-stage usability challenges will be essential to ensuring trust, security, and broad adoption during public rollout.
User feedback underscored the importance of plain language in building confidence. Technical terms unfamiliar to non-experts (such as “r-value” and “retrofit”) occasionally created uncertainty in responses and final reports. Incorporating definitions, tooltips, and visual explanations will make the Portal more inclusive while improving data quality.
Users were highly engaged with the home questionnaire and expressed interest in providing more detailed inputs, particularly for homes with non-standard systems or advanced construction. Expanding questionnaire logic to accommodate these scenarios will improve the precision of energy ratings and upgrade recommendations.
The strongest qualitative signal from the project was the desire for expert support. Nearly three in four users ranked access to expert guidance as a top feature, viewing the PEI Home Energy Portal as the first step rather than the final destination. Integrating the Portal with EfficiencyPEI’s expert services will create a cohesive pathway from initial curiosity to completed retrofit projects.
This project confirmed that a digital assessment can engage homeowners, boost energy literacy, and motivate climate action across Prince Edward Island.
Portal Refinements
Targeted refinements will further strengthen accuracy and user confidence. Most importantly, by tightly integrating digital insights with human expertise, the Portal is positioned to become a cornerstone of PEI’s residential energy efficiency and climate adaptation strategy, empowering homeowners while generating high-quality data to support the province’s net-zero ambitions.
Equity
The Portal offers greater access to personalized home upgrade advice by making it available to anyone with an internet connection. It is designed to work alongside existing systems rather than replace them, thus providing more options for accessing home upgrade advice and programs.
Scale
This project is just one phase in a larger initiative for Prince Edward Island to be the first North American jurisdiction to label 100% of homes, with the goal of accelerating climate adaptation and improving household affordability.
Work With Climative
Climative’s homeowner engagement platform, Climative Navigator, is available to banks, insurance, utilities, and government agencies with a stake in residential climate adaptation. Contact us to make a custom Portal available to your community or customer base to break down barriers to retrofits.
As Climative's VP of Product, Ian drives product strategy, focusing on customer needs and strong product-market fit. He's an entrepreneurial leader who loves paddling his homemade canoe.
Climative provides a collaborative AI-assisted data platform for organizations to enable personalized advice and offers to building owners, taking the guesswork out of building upgrades and transforming the low carbon economy.
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