As sustainable design moves from individual buildings into thinking about neighbourhood and municipality, the design community is trying to reduce the community`s reliance on fossil fuels. Part of this evolving thought process is to find ways to reduce the energy losses due to distance between energy production and energy use.
There are 2 basic views of energy efficiency for a community energy system:
1 – “Bigger is Better” – economies of scale create production efficiencies; even though the transmission losses because of transporting the energy (overhead wires) from the generating station to the end user are significant.
The Guelph Community Energy Plan prepared by Garforth International llc, (2007) has provided the following real example from Guelph’s energy use profile. “Today Guelph’s 1, 627GWh annual electricity use in reality uses 4,074 GWhe of fuel, the difference being lost as heat, creating non-productive costs and significant greenhouse gas emissions.”
2 – “Keep it Local” – Generate energy in a local scale station, which, although possibly less efficient in production, saves on shorter distance to transport energy, which creates efficiency.
Both approaches have merit. The fluctuation in demand between various users (houses, manufacturing industry, offices) is easier to balance when you have a large production stream. However, the large production stations have to produce to peak demand, and then energy is “dumped” when not used.
Large institutional users, such as hospitals, academic buildings etc. are ideal consumers of a small scale district energy system.
The Milton Education Village is a great opportunity for local power generation: which can acquire it’s energy source from the nearby landfill. Biogas has been successfully used in other Canadian municipalities to generate hot water / steam energy systems. The distance from the landfill to the Milton Education Village is less than 1km as the crow flies, and an estimated 1.5 million sq.ft can be built in the village.
The Cleantech sector buildings will be supported by a non- fossil fuel source of power for their operations. The university campus and student housing will provide balanced loads for the district energy power generation.
Because Town of Milton controls the planning parameters (and could also control the operation of the development ) this is an excellent fit for such a concept. Minimal transmission losses; local power generation source, reduction in fossil fuels. Win Win Win!!
Milton can pride itself on Going Green. Further, the plan opens up possibilities for a sustainable community beyond anything that Milton has accomplished to date.
The planned Milton Education Village is a terrific 400 acre piece of land on the western edge of the Town, facing west to the Niagara Escarpment, and with easy access from / to the 401 by way of a planned interchange at Tremaine and 401. It is slightly north-west of the Regional landfill site, and is bordered by the Niagara escarpment zone to the north-west.