This article was published by The Energy Mix on July 18, 2024.
By Gaye Taylor
With just months to go before it opens to students and faculty, George Brown College’s Limberlost Place is poised to keep its air cool and its water hot by plumbing the depths of Lake Ontario.
An award-winning, 10-storey mass timber building, Limberlost Place will soon be connected to Lake Ontario by more than just the view, becoming the latest building in downtown Toronto to hook into the prodigious latent energy of its deep waters, reports CBC News.
Enwave Energy Corporation, a Toronto-based sustainable district energy provider, has been using the deep waters of Lake Ontario to cool city buildings since 2004, courtesy of three giant pipes that extend roughly five kilometres out into Lake Ontario at a depth of some 85 metres, where temperatures are a steady 4℃.
The pipes channel water to and from a downtown heat transfer station, which is itself linked to a 40-kilometre network of pipes that run beneath Toronto’s downtown core. In all, 180 buildings encompassing some 40 million square feet of real estate are now plugged into Enwave’s deep lake water cooling (DLWC) system.
By eliminating the need for chillers and compressors, the system cuts electricity use and brings chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)—ozone-depleting chemicals typically used in traditional air conditioners—to zero.
Compared to traditional chillers, DLWC systems can reduce electricity use by about 80 per cent. Enwave’s system saves an estimated 832 million litres (220 million U.S. gallons) of water annually—equivalent to nearly 350 Olympic-size swimming pools. The Toronto system also displaces 55 megawatts of electricity demand, the equivalent of powering eight hospitals, reducing strain on the provincial grid during summer peak periods.
Enwave, which is co-owned by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and a consortium of Australian pension funds, has now begun the process of expanding its heat transfer station, upgrades that will increase the system’s capacity by 40 per cent, reported the Globe and Mail in April.
The core of the heat transfer station expansion will be a facility called Enwave Green Heat, a system “that will provide enough low-carbon heating to make it possible to have an additional 10 million square feet of commercial towers in downtown Toronto net-zero heated.”
And in latest news, Enwave has added a fourth underwater pipe, an extension of three kilometres that has “significantly increased capacity,” George Brown College reports on its website.
Courtesy of the heat transfer station expansion, Limberlost will also be getting its hot water from the cold waters of Lake Ontario, Carson Gemmill, Enwave’s vice president of solutions and innovations, told CBC.
“When we cool a building, it comes back into our system as waste heat,” he said. “We can take that waste heat energy, upgrade through heat pumps… which are inherently low carbon, and then produce hot water from that.”
Michelle McCollum, vice president of facilities and sustainability at George Brown, told CBC that Limberlost’s decision to plug into district energy is part of a larger commitment to community sustainability and resilience.
“District energy really means that we’re sharing energy,” she said. “We’re not using too much or too little, but we’re actually sharing that with the broader community, which is a really important concept in terms of sustainability and of resilience. We want to set an example for the broader community, while being a living laboratory for our students to learn within.”
Joining such notable landmarks as the Fairmont Royal York Hotel, Limberlost Place “will be the first mass timber net-zero building to be cooled and heated using the Enwave system,” says CBC.
The target date for opening the building is sometime in 2025.
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