District Energy Capital Expansion Project

This pilot project represents Phase 2 of development of Markham’s Smart Growth downtown, Markham Centre - thelargest greenfield urban planning project in North America with a planning area of 988 acres and upwards of 15 millionsquare feet of residential, commercial and institutional buildings. Markham District Energy Inc. (MDEI), created in 2000to offer an environmentally sustainable energy solution to developers, and the Town are working towards having over 90per cent of the developed square footage of Markham Centre connected to the community energy system. This pilotproject will expand the distribution system northwards and eastwards, with infill of the existing system and installation ofchilled water storage technology and efficiency upgrades. These activities are necessary to grow the customer base tomatch the heating and cooling capacity currently available from MDEI’s existing plant and to attract more customers. Thecurrent MDEI production facility has a combined heat and power (CHP) plant (3.5 megawatt (MW) electrical and 3.2 MWthermal capacity) plus additional high efficiency boilers (10 MW capacity) and absorption chillers (1.5 MW capacity). It isestimated that once the current capacity of the CHP plant is reached (at 10 Mw peak heating load), the district energysystem will require approximately 25% as much natural gas as the alternative (individual furnaces). This equates tonatural gas savings of 1.7 million cubic metres and GHG reductions of approximately 3,200 tonnes of CO2 equivalentper year.