Small Community Infrastructure Sustainability - Energy

April 17th, 2007 - Vancouver City Council today received a staff report confirming that the City will pursue sewer heat recovery as the heat source for Phase 1 of the Olympic Village and Southeast False Creek (SEFC) development.  This is relevant to small communities due to the neighbourhood scale of the project. 

As the name implies, a sewer heat recovery system will extract heat from local sewers, which will then be used to heat buildings and domestic hot water in the new SEFC neighbourhood. This innovative method has significant advantages over conventional gas or electric heat. Sewer heat will generate half the greenhouse gas emissions of natural gas, with substantially lower levels of air-shed pollutants.  Small Communities experiencing growth and development should begin contemplating innovating projects such as sewer heat recovery.