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.