Pre-feasibility Study Of District Energy In The West Campus Development
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2014
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Abstract
District Energy (DE) stands as a promising technology, which has environmental, energy, and economic benefits. DE has the potential to reduce our dependence on centralized energy production, carbon-intensive power generation, and also alleviates significant infrastructure cost at the building and community levels. Currently, centralized electricity generation creates system inefficiencies, which are both wasteful and expensive elements of status quo operations. Building specific downstream heating and cooling infrastructure poses similar liabilities. While DE systems are currently being used in a variety of urban applications with the goal of avoiding these system inefficiencies altogether, these systems do require a master-planned implementation in most cases, which makes retrofitting a challenging endeavor. The objective of this report is to perform a pre-feasibility study as to whether DE can be implemented into the West Campus Development (WCD), and how that implementation ought to be performed. The first chapter of this report describes the research intent, DE and combined heat and power as technologies, as well as the WCD concept, and the basis for most of this report’s data; the University of Calgary’s central plant and DE network. The central chapters (2, 3, & 4) of this report outline the benefits of DE pertaining to energy, the environment, and economics respectively, with each chapter concluding with WCD case-specific benefits. The final chapters offer recommendations and a conclusion for the case. Most of the report uses data and implementation concepts obtained from leading DE systems in both Canada and the United-States. Additionally, hard data comes from the University of Calgary’s own central plant. Currently known load profiles, natural gas usage and electricity consumption values were applied to specific land use types in WCD. The highest density development within the WCD, known as the ‘density hub’, is the focus of the DE network implementation.
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Dufour, P., Mistry, K., & Ritchie, R. (2014). Pre-feasibility Study Of District Energy In The West Campus Development (Unpublished report). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB.