About us
Earthrise Building Services is a Whitehorse, Yukon-based company founded and led by CEO Matthew Ooms, a Professional Engineer with a PhD in Mechanical Engineering, dedicated specifically to advancing residential deep energy retrofits in northern Canada — a climate context (extreme cold, remote supply chains, older uninsulated housing stock) that makes sustainable renovation both more difficult and more urgent than in most of the country. The company provides end-to-end support for homeowners undertaking deep energy retrofits, including energy assessments, retrofit planning, and comprehensive project support tailored to Yukon's climate and building conditions.
Before founding Earthrise, Ooms managed the Government of Yukon's energy efficiency programs, where he helped develop the territory's climate change mitigation strategies, oversaw deployment of a network of electric-vehicle fast chargers along Yukon's highways, and researched the effectiveness of cold-climate heat pumps in the north. Earthrise Building Services Inc. has secured $1 million in federal funding from Natural Resources Canada's Greener Neighbourhoods Pilot Program (GNPP) — a program explicitly modelled on the Netherlands' Energiesprong ('energy leap') approach — to develop a roadmap for deep energy retrofits and build regional retrofit capacity by grouping similar homes into single, large-scale retrofit projects rather than treating each home individually. The company has also worked on a deep energy retrofit initiative upgrading homes for the Kwanlin Dün First Nation (KDFN), and its northern retrofit work has been featured by the National Research Council of Canada and CBC News in coverage of federal heat-pump adoption funding for the Yukon.
Earthrise Building Services is based in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. Matthew Ooms also serves as a Director of the nonprofit Retrofit Canada, an open-source deep-retrofit knowledge-sharing organization aiming to help retrofit every Canadian building by 2050.contact