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New Energy World™
New Energy World™ embraces the whole energy industry as it connects and converges to address the decarbonisation challenge. It covers progress being made across the industry, from the dynamics under way to reduce emissions in oil and gas, through improvements to the efficiency of energy conversion and use, to cutting-edge initiatives in renewable and low-carbon technologies.
Waste heat recovery: How to reuse heat that typically goes down the drain
25/9/2024
10 min read
Feature
An innovative Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, wastewater heat recovery project is in the final stages of a C$20mn ($14.70mn) expansion. The facility, which links into a municipal district energy system, demonstrates a neighbourhood-scale model for supplying low-carbon thermal energy. Such systems also have the potential to reduce electrical grid load while improving the energy efficiency of energy-sapping buildings such as data centres, reports New Energy World Senior Editor Will Dalrymple.
This novel waste-to-energy system was originally conceived and built for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, during which time nine blocks of flats were constructed on brownfield land in the centre of the city to house visiting athletes, and then converted to high-end housing.
Derek Pope, Associate Director of the City of Vancouver Neighbourhood Energy Utility, says: ‘The city wanted to deliver a sustainable games, and a sustainable Olympic village. In Vancouver we inventory where our greenhouse gas emissions are coming from and buildings are responsible for more than 50% of the city’s emissions; we commonly heat with natural gas. The city wanted to create a more sustainable path for the future.’
Situated only a few blocks from the Olympic village buildings was the False Creek sewage pumping station, one of 26 such facilities scattered around the city that send wastewater, at a volume of hundreds of litres/s, onward for treatment. There, the False Creek Neighbourhood Energy Utility contracted Trane to install a 3.2 MW Tecsier heat pump, which received a diverted stream of the wastewater, and extracted the heat energy which is then supplied to a network that has since grown to service 46 buildings.