July 9, 2008

PETER KENTER

Old public housing stock in Regent Park is making way for a mixed-use, mixed-income development.

Regent Park Community Energy System features centralized power plant

PETER KENTER

correspondent

When Toronto’s Regent Park community was designed more than 50 years ago, it relied on a centrally located boiler to provide heat to all of the surrounding structures. Now, although the buildings in the low-income community are coming down to make way for a new mixed-income, mixed-use development, the idea of a centralized power plant still has environmental appeal.

Phase One of the Toronto Community Housing (TCH) project includes the creation of The Regent Park Community Energy System, an environmentally-conscious plan to provide competitively-priced heating, cooling and hot water to all of the buildings in the community while slashing carbon dioxide emissions. The buildings will use 40 per cent less energy than the consumption levels set in Model National Energy Code Standards.

The Daniels Corporation, developer for Phase One of the Regent Park Revitalization plan, is installing high-efficiency boilers in the basement of a 22-storey seniors’ building rising up at the corner of Dundas and Sackville streets.

The system will use insulated underground pipes to eventually service every building in the new Regent Park, and perhaps to sell utilities to other buildings beyond the development’s borders.

“The system has been designed to use almost any form of energy,” says Martin Blake, vice-president of project implementation with Daniels.

“Although the primary fuel will be natural gas, the system is designed so that we can easily incorporate solar energy or geothermal power. We can also potentially produce up to five megawatts of clean electricity through cogeneration.”

When the system goes online this fall, it will be capable of producing 11 megawatts of heating and up to 2,350 tons of chilled water, but will expand to 30 megawatts of heating and 3,700 tons of cooling as new buildings are erected.

“A lot of the cost of subsidized housing is on the utility side,” says Blake. “This will definitely help to reduce the cost of utilities required to heat and cool those buildings.”

The construction phase of the project involves laying down an extensive infrastructure to service immediate and future needs.

“They’re pretty full loads,” says Blake. “A lot of the challenge with the construction of a development like this with such a large energy plant is to co-ordinate the mechanical and structural requirements closely. We also need to keep the original Regent Park steam plant working for the remaining buildings and we’re trying to keep rerouting to a minimum.”

The chillers for the system are located on the top of the seniors’ building, but the location for the system’s stack isn’t readily apparent to the casual observer. “We’re running the stack right through the building where it can’t be seen,” says Blake.

The environmental appeal of the development isn’t limited to the energy systems alone.

Each building in this and future phases of the 69-acre project will be built to LEED Gold standard certification. “TCH has directed a lot of effort to developing efficient building envelopes.

“It isn’t going to be a cookie-cutter development with all of the buildings having the same appearance. Each building will look different and the project will be designed by various architects, so part of the challenge is to maintain the same level of efficiency using different exteriors.”

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