Canada's National Observer
Summary
Under the south end of Vancouver’s Cambie Bridge, there’s a squat cement building with big windows. Look through them and you’ll see a labyrinth of industrial pipes, some narrow as a baseball bat, others wide as a waterslide. They’re all sucking heat from the same common source, which passes by out of sight below them: a sewer main.
This is the False Creek Energy Centre. The pipes spread underground from here throughout the surrounding neighborhood, forming a network that heats the homes and showers of more than 10,000 Vancouverites. It’s a novel twist on a practice that dates back to ancient Rome: district energy.
The concept is simple. Find a central source of heat, use it to warm up water, then pipe that heated water into a network of surrounding buildings. There’s no limit on what the heat source is. The very first district energy network in Canada dates back to 1912, when the University of Toronto installed a network of pipes to heat 20 campus buildings using coal — some 20,000 tonnes a year — to boil the water and make steam. That was still more efficient (the primary appeal of district energy) than giving each of those 20 buildings its own furnace, but it was hardly clean.
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