Sewage plant heat may generate power
$17.9m system captures thermal energy
Metro Vancouver’s board will decide this week whether to spend $17.9 million on a system to capture thermal energy from treated sewage at the new North Shore Waste Water Treatment Plant.
Staff have recommended the expenditure, along with an agreement to sell the energy to the City of North Vancouver’s Lonsdale Energy Corp., and the regional district’s utilities committee gave it the green light last week.
“Hopefully, we’ll get it through and we’ll be able to produce basically free energy that would have otherwise gone into the ocean,” said utilities committee chair Darrell Mussatto, who is also the mayor of the city of North Vancouver. “We’re excited about that.”
The $525-million contract to design and build the new sewage treatment plant was awarded to ADApT Consortium earlier this year, and construction for the plant began in the spring.
Effluent heat recovery, which involves using the excess heat in treated sewage as an alternative energy source, was included in the designbuild-finance contract as an optional item.
If the board votes in favour of building the system, the North Shore plant will be the first Metro Vancouver-owned wastewater treatment plant with a thermal energy recovery system.
“This is sort of a one-time opportunity. If we don’t plan for it now and build it now, it will be very expensive to do it after the plant is built,” said Mussatto.
About 15 per cent of the energy produced will be used by Lonsdale Energy Corp. (LEC), which is a district energy provider owned by the City of North Vancouver. That means Metro can sell the rest of the energy to other utilities in the future.
The region will pay $17.9 million to install the effluent heat recovery system, while LEC will install distribution piping for approximately $3.5 million and pay for operating costs in exchange for the energy it receives. It’s expected the regional district will receive about $1 million in grants from B.C. Hydro toward the project.
Effluent heat recovery will result in greenhouse gas reductions by displacing the use of natural gas in LEC’s district energy system.
Currently LEC uses natural gas boilers for 85 per cent of its energy, plus solar panels and geothermal for the rest. Once it is hooked up to the wastewater treatment plant, 100 per cent of its base energy requirements will be renewable. The boilers will only be needed when energy demand peaks. “That’s a great achievement,” said Mussatto. Greenhouse gas reductions will be shared by the regional district, LEC and B.C. Hydro on the basis of capital contributions.
Starting in 2021, about 5,700 tonnes per year of reductions will be allocated to the regional district — enough to make the liquid waste utility carbon neutral — LEC will receive about 1,200 tonnes and Hydro 300 tonnes.
Mussatto said that thanks to the carbon credits the plant will earn, the cost of building the system will be recovered in 17 to 18 years.
The budget for the project is $700 million, $405 million of which is coming from the federal and provincial governments.