The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Sewer Power: How Wastewater Can Heat and Cool Our Homes

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

The Ontario city that's not letting what you flush go to waste. How the world's largest wastewater energy transfer project will lead the way to heating and cooling our homes with low carbon emissions. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What if heat from this, this, this and this could be used somewhere else in your community rather than flushing it away? If we could capture that neglected heat in our wastewater, passing it on like an efficient heat sharing program. Well, if you live in Markham, Ontario, you might soon be participating in such a thing. Our TVO crew and the Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, Christia Freeland, travelled to Markham District Energy, or MDE for short, for the breaking ground ceremony of their latest green technology asset, the world's largest wastewater energy transfer project. The first of its kind was in False Creek, Vancouver for the Olympic Games back in 2010,

serving the 2,800 athletes and officials housed in the Olympic Village. So here we are today to celebrate the beginning of our 25th anniversary year as a company and as a district energy system. There's another piece of infrastructure that was here 25 years ago, the York Region Wastewater Main. It's been here the entire time. Energy has always been flowing in that wastewater main.

And now the heat energy from this wastewater will be used again. York Region's really excited to be partnering with Markham District Energy on this innovative project. The basics of it is that we're going to be using sewage, which is flowing by the property here already on its way for treatment at Duffin Creek.

And they'll be using heat pump technology to be able to heat their district heating system. And that provides heating for numerous buildings that allows us to connect to York Region's main sewer line that carries 2,500 liters per second. In the summer when it's really hot out like it is today they'll actually be able to use the same technology to inject heat into the sewage to create cooling. You really see here a community of people who have been working really creatively to support this exciting, growing Canadian municipality and to be sure that this municipality has the energy it needs, the heating it needs, the cooling it needs as it grows and as we have to hit net zero together.

Not a lot of people know what district energy is. They know the electricity grid, they know the natural gas grid coming to their homes and so on. District energy is maybe considered by some the missing grid. It's a thermal energy grid, it's an underground system. So from a central plant, that's one of our plants that we're standing here at, we produce hot water, we produce chill water at these plants and that gets fed in this underground system to buildings that are connected to the grid. We are looking at plant operations for Markham Centre. From this location, Taylor our operator on site today can control three facilities. Manages the heating and cooling load for all the condos

and a couple of town homes in the area and a few data centers. District energy is sometimes referred to as community energy or a thermal energy grid. There's different terminologies in different parts of the world, but it's a very old way of heating and cooling cities and urban centers. So every single building here in Markham Centre, as far as you can see, is connected to our systems. There's thousands of district energy systems in cities and campuses around the world. In Canada there's hundreds of systems, one here in Markham.

The oldest system is in London, Ontario, which is about 150 years old. The University of Toronto has a community energy or a thermal district energy system that was, I think, built in 1912, so it's over 100 years there. N-Wave is the largest district energy system in Canada, in downtown Toronto. They have a heating system that dates back 50 or 60 years and more recently they built this deep lake water cooling system taking energy from the lake which is high efficiency environmentally to use that energy in the lake to cool the buildings in the downtown core so they're the largest system in Canada we're probably the fastest growing system in Canada and then there's lots of other examples

across the country. According to the International Energy Agency, IEA, 90% of district heating networks around the world burn fossil fuels, including MDE, which relies mainly on natural gas-fired combined heat and power plants. This project is helping to offset that reliance on fossil fuels. Energy has always been very, very inexpensive in North America, in Canada, in Ontario. When we are doing this project, which is very capital intensive, what we are really doing is avoiding the purchase of natural gas, which is what we normally use to produce the heating energy in all of our plants. We're avoiding using natural gas and using electricity to power the low-carbon-centre heat pumps.

District energy is an important solution to decarbonize energy systems for cities, communities, and campuses around the world. Investments in district energy infrastructure are accelerating the shift to lower carbon solutions. One of the first environmental strategies deployed by Citi's District Energy displaced hundreds of individual coal boilers making air cleaner, buildings safer and easier to operate and manage. When constructed, this wastewater transfer center is expected to reduce MDE's carbon emissions for the production of thermal energy by over 30,000 tons per year significantly advancing MDE's goal of becoming net zero by 2050 and contributing to the overall emissions reductions.

Over time district energy systems have evolved to leverage new technologies like industrial heat pumps, geothermal energy sharing, and a wide range of renewable resources. Back in 1998 when the ice storm ripped through the eastern part of Ontario and Quebec, it was an eye-opener for a lot of communities to realize how vulnerable we could be. That's one of the early reasons and rationale for what we did here. Unlike hydro systems that have poles above ground and you know they do get hit by impact, you don't know a lot about disarray energy because it's an underground system. Nobody knows it's there. After 24 years we're at 99.999% uptime reliability. It's hard to put our system out of commission when we're underground.

Again, with the help of these green re-listel funds, is a thermal storage tank, hot water thermal storage tank. So, we're producing power and we're covering heat off the power plants, it's a simple generation cycle. Sometimes you can't use all the heat in that moment. Yep. If we couldn't use it at the moment we'd have to waste it. So this is your largest hot water storage tank in Mark. Right here. Wow! So we store the energy here and use it then when we can use it. So long showers are okay? Long showers are okay. So I mean that's a very...

You know what? And We are 30 years behind Europeans when you have a different energy. And when we have our friends from Scandinavia come over, some of Rob's members from Europe, and before we had this, they say, where's your thermal story? It's like, you don't waste anything. It's such an easy asset to build,

so we build it. I'd also like to highlight the additional partnerships that have made today possible, in particular the government of Canada. Honestly you've put in place programs that enable green innovation and this project is the recipient of funding from the Low Carbon Energy Fund and MDE has signed the first contract for differences in all of Canada. Another great achievement and thank you, thank you Minister. Carbon needs to be priced at something in the neighbourhood of three or four hundred dollars a ton.

That's the sort of value you have to put on the climate damage due to use of fossil fuels. I know the Canadian government when they're making decisions internally, they're making decisions internally they're doing a shadow pricing of around $300 a ton. It's not $300 a ton but they're saying let's assume it is and we'll make our decision on making investments in that way. Most importantly those investments by the Canada Growth Fund are helping to create great jobs for Canadians today, while keeping Canada and when we think Markham, we think Green, so Markham on track to net zero. Our current carbon price is around $80. It's going to 170 in Canada if it's not interrupted.

And eventually in Canada, it'll have to go beyond that. So the contract for differences that we've signed protects us in the first 10 years of any carbon policy change. Carbon contracts for difference reduce risk for companies investing in clean technologies by guaranteeing the price of carbon or carbon credits for a fixed period of time, regardless of the market price. Yeah so we recover all the waste heat from the chilled water system through these heat pump technologies which is powered by electricity and elevates it and we feed it back into the heating

system. Sorry where's my in-bridge friend? Sorry I'm just telling all the things we're replacing natural gas but this asset with the things we're replacing natural gas with. This asset with the coolant operation reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 4,600 tons a year. So we had a thousand over there. Our combined heat and power plant is reduced to by about 7,500 tons a year. This is 4,600. And then we're going to talk about the wastewater energy transfer project is the big one. Other places in the world are decades ahead of us in terms of valuing carbon and pricing carbon.

And that is, and that's supported investments in clean energy, low carbon technology. This project is our first big move, this wastewater project. But there's other technologies hitting our sector big time, which is the other one is deep geothermal. There's a project that's just been launched in Germany. They're not just drilling a few hundred yards into a ground source, they're drilling three or four kilometers to get to the temperature deep underground, pulling that temperature up and heating an entire community. So deep geothermal is where we will be eventually. That's the next big move and interestingly, I wouldn't have thought

I'd be talking about this five years ago in our business, but there's lots of talking about small modular reactors, like small, not 500 megawatt or 600 megawatt nuclear plants, but a 15 megawatt small modular reactor that could fit in this building. That is clean energy. So these are technologies that will feed a district system like this and truly be zero carbon emitting in the years to come. And we're

just along that path.