District Energy simply is taking a number of buildings and
combining them with underground infrastructure to bring them
heating and cooling. There's a lot of value that district
energy can bring. One of the biggest things we hear about is
the space savings. So buildings no longer need to put their own
mechanical equipment in their building. So they save thousands
of square feet and they're able to take that real estate and
sell it. Cities consume more than 75% of the world's energy,
much of it
for heating and cooling. District energy can help them
make more efficient use of local energy sources and get closer to
achieving their decarbonization goals. The biggest benefit of
district energy is scale. It's the ability to aggregate demand.
So you aggregate load across a whole bunch of buildings and
then you can access different technologies that you wouldn't
be able to otherwise access in your own building. A simple
example is deep lake water cooling. We can't build deep
lake water cooling for one building, but we can for 100 in
downtown Toronto, which is what we did. So it gives access to
renewable energy at scale. Toronto's Deep lake water
cooling system is the largest of its kind, displacing 55
megawatts
annually from the electricity grid. The project's operator, Enwave,
began as a city owned utility providing steam heat to
local buildings. The company expanded significantly under
private ownership and now provides both heating and
cooling to about 150 buildings in Canada's largest city. It's
also developing a range of district energy technologies. In
2021, we were purchased by Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan
and we're currently operating in a number of locations across
Canada. It was important to us to invest in Enwave really for a
few reasons. We found that it's great that they're
in our our backyard and frankly they're a leader
in Canada in providing district energy solutions and we
are also a global investor and we believe they have the skills
and experience that we can take them globally. Enwave
projects include a geothermal energy system that serves
hundreds of homes in Markham, ON. A project that converts
municipal waste to energy in Charlottetown, PEI, and in Toronto,
a massive thermal energy storage facility that will be the first
of its kind in Canada. One of our biggest challenges is
climate change and it's the amount of these storms that keep
on happening that were once 100 year storms, but we have to
think differently about our business with the frequency that
they're happening right now. Which is really important, so
we've made adjustments to how we actually
run our business, how we develop the redundancy we have so that
we can continue to maintain the highest level of resilience and
provide energy to our customers, which are critical customers,
like hospitals and data centres, in downtown Toronto.
From some of our customers, we've even heard that they
reduce not just electricity consumption of their building,
but also water use, and in some cases, completely eliminate gas
use, which is pretty incredible knowing that our whole lives
we've relied on gas as a critical input into our
buildings. Even as it helps its customers become more efficient,
Enwave is working to decarbonize its own operations.
That includes adding an innovative low carbon heating
facility at the company's Pearl St. energy centre in Toronto.
The new plant will recycle waste heat to produce hot water via
electrified technologies. The low carbon heating will be
connected to the
companies existing district energy grid. The effect of what
we're doing at Pearl Street will be to decarbonize the equivalent
of about 10 million square feet of commercial towers. So that's
significant. And if we can continue to scale and replicate
that, it's going to be an amazing means to be able to
easily decarbonize the downtown core. With Enwave, not only do
we have the opportunity to make a great investment, but we also
have the opportunity to make a great impact. And what I find
with our own team, they're excited about this because they
realize not only are they providing great returns to the
teachers, but they're also part of something that they believe
in which is helping decarbonization. And that is a
shared vision that we have with Enwave. We find
whenever we're having meetings with Enwave or talking to them
about what they're doing, the pride comes out in terms of what
they are doing, the innovative solutions they're finding, how
they're helping buildings decarbonize and that is a shared
passion that that we have and we're finding that makes us
a stronger company and we're working together with them to
lead energy transition.