District Energy Program: Coming to a Community Near You
Communities around BC are welcoming another BC Hydro tool to help conserve energy. Launched in March 2010, the new Power Smart program called Sustainable Communities promotes a centralized energy system that can distribute heat to a cluster of buildings or, in some cases, an entire community.
District energy systems offer communities the option to harness one or more sources of local clean energy. Sources include biomass; waste heat produced as a by-product of other systems such as commercial refrigeration, sewers and thermal power plants; geo-exchange heat pumps; and solar thermal panels.
A centralized energy plant generates either heated water, chilled water or steam, which is distributed through buried pipes. This energy can then be used in participating buildings for space heating (or cooling) and domestic hot water, replacing traditionally higher energy apparatus, such as conventional furnaces, baseboard electric heaters, boilers and/or chillers.
The Sustainable Communities program is currently available to local governments, developers and institutional and industrial customers. Power Smart offers partial funding toward pre-feasibility and feasibility energy studies that determine the viability of a system in a particular setting. If viable, capital incentives are also available to help implement the system.
For more information, please visit the Sustainable Communities website.