INNOVATION November-December 2014

f ea t ures

The Future Begins Here Richmond’s First District Energy Utility

Tom Ruffen

The home of the Vancouver International Airport, Richmond, BC, was traditionally an agri- cultural community, but has now become a dynamic urban centre. In the early 1990s, the city first began to experience the dramatic growth that continues to this day. The current popula- tion of 207,500 is expected to expand to 280,000 by 2041, according to the City of Richmond Projections with Urban Futures Inc. “About 10 years ago we recognized the need to develop more sustainable energy models,” says John Irving, P.Eng., Director of Engineering for the City of Richmond. “We began to look at the concept of district energy, which employs ground heat pump technology to provide buildings with space heating, cooling and hot water through a centralized neighbourhood system.” In June of 2012, Richmond completed its first major sustainability energy project, opening phase one of the Alexandra District Energy Utility or ADEU, which increases heating and cooling efficiency by matching energy supply with energy demand. This achievement earned the City of Richmond APEGBC’s 2014 Sustainability Award, and now serves as a template for developing similar district energy utilities for the city’s high-density neighbourhoods. (District energy is not feasible for townhouses and single homes because of the cost of con- solidating and centralizing the individual chillers and boilers.) The ADEU services three buildings and is currently increasing its capacity for future development in the area. “The Alexandra neighbourhood, just east of the city centre, is a sec- tion of land that was slated for complete redevelopment,” says Irving. “It was an area of large- lot, single-family homes, and small-lot agricultural properties that we wanted to redevelop as a neighbourhood of four to six-storey multi-family residences.” The three main components of the district energy utility are the distribution pipelines, the central energy centre, and the energy transfer stations in each building, notes Alen Postolka, P.Eng., District Energy Manager for the City of Richmond. “The system extracts renewable geothermal energy from the ground using a network of 385 vertical boreholes drilled in a geo-exchange field 250 feet beneath a greenway corridor. It’s a quite innovative public works project. Our entire infrastructure is below the ground. We do have our energy plant located in a neighbourhood park, but most of it is underground, so there’s minimal intrusion. We have also commissioned a public art project to beautify the small, visible part of the structure.”

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