Metro Vancouver moves to take some heat off its Burnaby trash incinerator
Metro Vancouver is deep into a $207 million plan to offset the greenhouse gases it produces from burning about 25 per cent of the region's garbage, with what could be the biggest district energy system in North America.
The regional authority has incinerated about 240,000 tonnes of the region's trash at a facility in South Burnaby since 1988, where it has also always generated enough electricity to power some 16,000 homes, said Paul Henderson, general manager of solid waste service.
The next step, however, is to harvest a lot of the heat that the waste-to-energy facility generates and turn it into hot water for the River District neighbourhood in south Vancouver, then eventually Burnaby's Metrotown town centre and Edmonds neighbourhood.
Henderson said the incinerator generates steam as a means to cool its combustion chamber, but it also drives a turbine that generates electricity for sale to B.C. Hydro.
“With district energy, you take some of that steam and heat hot water,” Henderson said. “And by doing that, you triple the energy recovery of the system, because it's more efficient to heat hot water than generate electricity.”
Metro is now well into the detailed design work for the project's first phase, construction of a new central energy centre adjacent to the incinerator and six-kilometre pipeline system to tie into the River District's existing system, expected to cost $84 million and be in place by 2026.
Henderson said Metro signed an agreement with Vancouver in 2021 to embark on the project, which will see its hot water displace the natural-gas-fired boilers the River District system uses now, though it will keep those facilities as a backup.
And the City of Burnaby has set up a district energy utility to figure out the routes to connect additional pipelines to Metrotown and eventually Edmonds to serve mostly multi-family housing, which Metro expects will cost $123 million.
The budget for that second phase, however, hasn't been approved.
Henderson said there's a plan to install electric vehicle charging facilities along Riverbend Drive next to the entrance to Terminus Park in Burnaby.
In the long-term, this district energy system is expected to generate enough heat for 50,000 homes, cutting 70,000 tonnes of CO2 and offsetting the greenhouse gases from burning 240,000 tonnes of garbage.
Metro has seen a 23 per cent per capita reduction in the amount of trash people are throwing out each year since 2011, but Henderson said the regional district will still have residual garbage to deal with no matter what reduction and recycling efforts it puts in place “for the foreseeable future.”
“No matter how you manage that residual garbage, there's always going to be greenhouse gases associated with it,” Henderson said.
Landfilling garbage produces methane, which is an even more potent greenhouse gas.
“For us, (the benefit) is the combination of minimizing the garbage to the extent we can and then also look for initiatives like this that have the potential to (reduce overall) greenhouse-gas emissions,” Henderson added.
District energy, distributing centrally produced steam or hot water over a large geographic area, isn't a new concept and several Metro municipalities have considerable experience with such utilities with some 18 dotted across the region.
Independently owned Creative Energy operates a district system that supplies heat to a lot of downtown Vancouver, which it's partly electrifying, among its portfolio of utilities.
The city itself owns a district system that taps waste heat from the sewage system to supply Olympic Village, with plans to expand its footprint in False Creek.
Metro itself is working with municipalities on similar projects to tap waste heat from sewer systems, Henderson said.
Henderson said the waste to energy district system is being designed on a “cost recovery” model that will see Metro charge wholesale rates for heat that return its capital cost over the life of the project.
“You can imagine, with a system like this, those initial upfront costs are really high,” he said. But “once it's in the ground, (and) the infrastructure is built, the annual operating costs are relatively low.”