With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1458960
C ities represent some- thing of a climate para- dox. On the one hand, they're the answer to global warming: more efficient land use (think up, not out) means fewer people commuting, and more land for the farms and forests that sustain us. On the other hand, cities are energy hogs. Urban centres consume about 75 percent of the world's primary energy (en- ergy harvested directly from natural resources) and emit between 50 and 60 percent of its greenhouse gases, according to the United Nations. Building operations alone represent 28 percent of global emissions. As the march toward urban- ization continues, we need to find more sustainable ways of powering our cities. And one of those ways is a rather old It Takes a Village District energy—a centuries-old solution for a greener urban grid—is gaining new converts in our warming world by Matt O'Grady I T ' S A G O OD T H I NG concept gaining new currency: district energy. District energy—the central- ized generation and distribu- tion of thermal energy, via pipes—has been around for centuries, even millennia (if you count the hot water–heated baths and greenhouses of an- cient Rome). But it really came into vogue in the booming cities of Europe and America in the 19th century: a way to more efficiently power a dense community of residences and businesses. Efficient though it may have been, it wasn't always green. For decades, coal, oil and natural gas have been fuelling the cogeneration plants that provide much of the district en- ergy. That's starting to change, especially as residential and commercial developers em- brace ESG principles and move toward a net-zero future. Vancouver developer West- bank and its founder, Ian Gillespie, saw the potential of a greener form of district energy about a decade ago—not just for its downtown developments (Telus Garden, among them), but for the rest of Vancouver and for cities everywhere. In 2014, Gillespie paid $32 million to buy Vancouver's Central Heat Distribution—one of the largest district energy systems in North America—and renamed it Creative Energy, committing to convert its natural gas boilers to a lower- carbon fuel. The man who's helping him make that happen is Krishnan Iyer, CEO of Creative Energy since 2018. "The typi- cal Creative Energy client is a residential building or office or hospital," says Iyer, noting that the company serves about 220 customers across more than 45 million square feet of connected real estate in down- town Vancouver. The common denominator is not just dense real estate but intense energy usage: "Health care is a very high-energy endeavour," Iyer says, pointing to St. Paul's Hospital as an example. "It has to be worthwhile to put the pipes in the ground to serve those buildings." When Central Heat was cre- ated in 1968, switching from coal to natural gas was the big upgrade in fuel generation; in 2022, it's electricity and renew- able sources of energy. Creative Energy currently has a pro- posal before the B.C. Utilities Commission to add two electric steam boilers to its cogenera- tion plant at 720 Beatty Street. "This will displace roughly 25,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year from downtown Vancouver," Iyer notes. When Gillespie bought the company, Creative Energy's natural gas-powered boilers were pumping out 70,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases annually—the single largest source of GHGs in Vancouver. In recent years, Creative Energy has expanded beyond downtown Vancouver to places such as Horseshoe Bay, Toronto's Mirvish Village and Seattle, where it signed a deal with Swedish Health Services in December to modernize the health-care giant's flagship First Hill Campus. Whether in Seattle, Toronto or Vancouver— be it retrofitting old infrastruc- ture, or building sustainability from the ground up—the vision is to expand beyond the singu- lar development and, piece by piece, decarbonize the grid, Iyer says. "With so much focus on ESG these days, district energy provides—I don't want to go as far as saying a silver bullet, but it certainly provides a signifi- cant solution for greenhouse gas emissions." n REDUCE, REUSE, RE-ENERGIZE Perhaps Vancouver's most visible manifestation of district energy is at the False Creek Energy Centre at the foot of the Cambie Bridge. There, LED lights on the exhaust stacks change colour from blue in times of low energy demand to red when there's high demand. The Centre is part of the False Creek Neighbourhood Energy Utility (NEU), launched in 2010. This self-funded public operation uses waste thermal energy captured from sewage to provide heat and hot water to buildings around False Creek. ( quality time ) 62 BCBUSINESS MARCH/APRIL 2022 SOURCE: CITY OF VANCOUVER. ISTOCK NEU now serves 6.4 MILLION SQUARE FEET of residential, commercial and institutional space THE UTILITY ELIMINATES 60%+ OF THE GHG POLLUTION ASSOCIATED WITH HEATING BUILDINGS NEU aims to transition its energy supply to 100% renewable sources by 2030