SANCTUARYPeel heat-resilience hubs

Vision

The future version only works if the prototype stays honest.

The current build ranks candidate hubs across three honest hazard lenses: heat, flood, and winter energy burden. This page shows the practical upgrades next: stronger access modelling, real site audits, a resident view only after verification, and repeatable scoring across Alectra territory.

Who uses this

Three desks open this on a Monday morning.

Sanctuary is built for the people who already decide which Peel buildings to prepare, open, and harden, not a new audience that has to be convinced the problem exists.

Office of Climate Change and Energy Management

Region of Peel

Prioritizes which trusted buildings to harden first, inside the neighbourhoods the HVI flags as most heat-vulnerable.

Region of Peel · climate change and energy

Alectra Utilities

Distribution planning

Plans where hardened, solar-and-battery sites strengthen the local grid as distributed energy resources, the resilience work in its distribution-system plan.

Alectra Utilities · investment and system plan

Roadmap, not built

Next, this becomes a deployable municipal playbook.

The current prototype ranks candidate hubs. The next phases focus on decision quality, verified readiness, and a scale path sponsors and municipal partners can fund with confidence.

  1. 1

    Real access modelling

    Replace the 500 m circles with real walksheds, the area actually reachable on foot once sidewalks, transit, and barriers are counted.

  2. 2

    Audit and verify

    Verify owners, cooling, accessibility, roof condition, backup power, and electrical readiness, one building at a time, then rerank with audited data.

  3. 3

    Resident guidance, later

    Only after verification, residents could see which open, equipped, trusted places to head for during heat or an outage, with live status and routing.

  4. 4

    Scale across hazards

    The map now layers heat, flood, and winter energy burden, each labelled honestly. Next is repeating the same scoring across more of Alectra's service territory and deepening each hazard with verified, building-level data.

What improves next

These are the highest-value upgrades from here: better hazard coverage, stronger verification, and a repeatable model that can expand across municipalities without overclaiming readiness.

Deeper winter / energy-burden data

modelled

The winter lens already ships: the 2021 Ontario Marginalization Index Material Resources dimension stands in as the affordability driver, not a fabricated cold-temperature map. Next is adding energy-cost-burden data per area, for example CUSP's energy-poverty explorer, and verifying heating and warming-space readiness building by building.

Walkshed precision

modelled

Upgrade from radius buffers to multimodal walksheds that reflect sidewalks, crossings, slope, and transit access.

Readiness verification pipeline

pending

Standardize site audits into a readiness score covering power, cooling, accessibility, ownership alignment, and operations.

Public readiness view

pending

Publish a resident-facing map only for verified hubs, showing which sites are open, equipped, and reachable during an event.

Schools as phase-2 hubs

pending

Peel District School Board (more than 250 schools) and the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board (152 schools) are strong candidates, reachable through Ontario's Community Use of Schools program that opens school space after hours. Each needs a board-level access agreement first, so it is a phase-2 layer, not a building we score today.

Replication across Alectra territory

modelled

The same honest scoring repeats across Alectra Utilities' Greater Golden Horseshoe service area. New geography, the same method and the same verified, modelled, and pending labels, so it reads as a template a utility or region can run, not a one-off Peel map.

The method repeats across Alectra's service territory. Alectra's GridExchange transactive-energy pilot ran in Vaughan, Markham, Barrie, Richmond Hill, and Hamilton, a Greater Golden Horseshoe template Peel can adopt rather than a Peel deployment. Alectra · GridExchange launch

How the hardening gets funded