How a B.C. firm is recycling heat
When laundry-service owner Mike Friedes was looking for an environmentally friendly way of dealing with energy use at his Annacis-Island facility, clean-energy entrepreneur Lynn Mueller had a ready-made solution in the hot water it churns out every day.
Friedes' company, Wash Out, bills itself as an eco-friendly laundry with pickup and delivery services for commercial and retail customers, and Mueller's firm, Sharc Energy Systems, designs and installs systems that recover and recycle the heat from waste water that would otherwise go down the drain.
“We were looking to do some upgrades on the facility that we're in,” Friedes said of their building 's “antiquated” systems, with “Fortis bills (that) were through the roof ” and a monthly carbon-tax charge that was “just astronomical.”
“And then also, the environmental impact was huge with that as well, so we knew we had to do something,” Friedes said.
That is where Sharc's systems come in.
The idea is to collect waste water in a tank, filter it, then run it through a heat exchanger to extract energy for heating, air conditioning or, more to Wash Out's needs, heat new hot water.
“Half the world's energy ends up going down the drain and just being wasted,” Mueller said, “so we want to recover as much of that as we can.”
Recycling the heat offsets a building owner's need for natural gas, curbing their carbon dioxide emissions in the process, “so we're very, very timely technology.”
Sewage-heat recovery is a concept Mueller started working on in 2010, when people thought it was a good idea and a cutting-edge technology being used in applications such as a district energy system for the Olympic Village development (now known as The Village on False Creek).
Fast-forward to 2021, and Mueller feels like “we've got an 11-year head start on the competition,” as governments ramp up programs to retrofit buildings to improve energy efficiency and meet climate goals.
Wash Out, with Sharc's help, used a FortisBC rebate under British Columbia's CleanBC program, which initially paid $81,000 of the $130,000 cost of installing Sharc's smaller-scale Piranha unit, designed for single-building commercial properties.
Then for completing the installation before March 31, Mueller said the grant covers 50 per cent of the remaining cost.
Friedes said the environmental aspect of the installation was key to Wash Out to back its eco-friendly mission statement, but the unit is also expected to cut the building's natural gas bill by up to 70 per cent.
“If it can perform at half of what it is supposed to, it will be transformative for us,” Friedes said of his 12-employee company.
“(The savings would be) somebody's salary.”
For the province, Wash Out's project is a big enough showcase of B.C.'s building retrofit programs that Energy Minister Bruce Ralston will attend a virtual unveiling over Zoom Tuesday morning along with Delta Coun. Dylan Kruger and executives from FortisBC, Sharc and Wash Out.
For Sharc, however, the Wash Out project is now on the smaller side of the installations it has been involved in. Those include a unit in the new U.S. Capital DC Water Headquarters in Washington, D.C. lauded by an influential U.S. lawmaker.
“I have never seen a technology that could have as positive of an impact on energy as what I have seen at the DC Water HQ,” said Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, from northern Ohio, for a March 10 media event.
Kaptur is also chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, so it was an encouraging endorsement for Mueller, who had the foresight to establish a satellite U.S. manufacturing plant in Bellingham, in addition to its Coquitlam facility.
“So we're made in North America, employing North American people,” Mueller said, with hopes of tapping into the green-energy ambitions in U.S. President Joe Biden's trillion-dollar infrastructure rebuilding plan.
In Canada, Sharc has established an initiative to work with provinces and municipalities on projects in an almost turnkey design, build and finance approach.
Mueller said the company didn't do a lot of sales in 2020, but based on inquiries, he is hopeful that it is hitting a growth phase.
Sharc is working on a $2-million system for a 100-hectare redevelopment project in Denver, Mueller said, and is looking at projects for Amazon in Virginia as well as the U.K.
“The future is here for us now, like I was dreaming for the last 11 years (about) market with demand four our products,” Mueller said. “We're there now, they need what we make.”