POWER
Summary
District energy systems can accelerate decarbonization of buildings in cities.
The clock is ticking for building owners in U.S. cities that have enacted performance standards to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The carrots and sticks of local energy codes to tackle climate change are quickly becoming mostly sticks.
With compliance deadlines looming, many owners of large buildings believe they have only undesirable choices: expensive heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) renovations that disrupt the lives of occupants or formidable non-compliance fines. In Boston, for example, buildings over 35,000 square feet stand to face penalties of $1,000 per day beginning this year for failing to comply with the city’s Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance (BERDO).
But there is another way to avoid fines and disruption that has been proven over many decades and today is being used in cities around the world, including nearly 900 sites across North America. One of the first environmental strategies to clean up urban air quality and reduce emissions, district energy systems are also gaining new recognition as a way to decarbonize multiple buildings at a time, with lower exposure to capital costs and physical disruption of major building retrofits, and reduced operational risks.
Today’s district energy systems are clearly cleaner and more sophisticated than those deployed at the turn of the century, but they operate under the same simple principles underlying early systems. Thermal energy in the form of steam, hot water, and/or chilled water is recovered or produced at a central plant and is delivered to multiple connected buildings through an underground network of insulated pipes to be used for space heating, air conditioning, or domestic hot water.
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