Metro set to vote on sewage-toenergy plan

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 Corporation, 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 design-build-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 Corporation (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.

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 be needed only when energy demand peaks.