District Energy - 2006 Second Quarter

Question
Qu^ofa^thr^eter
Join your colleagues in
online discussion.

Each quarter, IDEA is featuring a “ question of the quarter” related to one of its forum interest areas. Members are encouraged to visit IDEA’s forum bulletin board to weigh in on the topic and voice your opinions or share your experiences.

This quarter, we’re calling on all marketing personnel to go online to discuss these questions:

Is your system helping customers benchmark their energy usage (see p. 59)? If so, how is that working for you – and for your customers? What has been learned? How long have you been doing it? Do you do this for all of your customers? Is it part of your regular service or is it an additional fee?

Please visit the Marketing Forum Message Board to discuss this topic with your colleagues. The message board is located in the IDEA Forums section of the ‘Members Only’ dropdown menu on at www.districtenergy.org. You will need a login and a password, so if you don’t have them yet, please email your request to dina.idea@districtenergy.org. (You’ll also need to register to access the message board, but it’s worth it!)

Toronto-Dominion
Centre a Partner in
Energy Efficiency

The Toronto-Dominion Centre is Canada’s largest business community. Located in the core of Toronto’s financial district, the TD Centre is a city within a city, comprising six buildings with more than 4. 3 million sq ft of office and retail space. Designed by renowned architect Mies van der Rohe in the 1960s, the center’s clean and elegant lines have made it a modernist classic.

Tapestries from a number of Canadian artists hang in the tower lobbies and other examples of contemporary artwork are displayed in the surrounding courtyards. When the weather is warm, tenants can enjoy spending their lunch hours in the courtyards, which also serve as venues for area musicians. Managed by The Cadillac Fairview Corporation Limited, the TD Centre also is the foundation of the PATH system, Toronto’s well-traveled underground route for pedestrians.

Many of the thousands of pedestrians who use the PATH are also TD Centre tenants. It is the job of the center’s operations group to keep those tenants satisfied. The operations group maintains tenant satisfaction by making space-conditioning reliability and stable operating costs their main priorities. That’s where Enwave Energy Corp.’s district energy systems come in. The TD Centre has been using Enwave’s steam system for heating, hot water and humidification for more than 15 years, and its contract was recently renewed in 2004 for a 20- year term. Over the course of its relationship with Enwave, the TD Centre has never experienced an unscheduled interruption. In addition, Enwave’s new deep lake water cooling service has been providing air conditioning to the center for the past year.

time to devote to new initiatives. There is a misconception in the marketplace that connecting to Enwave’s outsourced services means a loss of in-house operations and facilities staff. That is not the case for TD Centre. The staff has been redirected to work on reducing overall energy costs and planning projects that positively impact tenant satisfaction. In fact, shift engineers, who normally used most of their time to work on operating and maintaining on-site boilers and chillers, are now focusing on optimizing the use of district energy services and implementing numerous energy conservation projects throughout the complex. With district energy in place, the TD Centre is redirecting at least 4,000 person-hours per year.

The TD Centre and Enwave are working together to change the traditional relationship between a customer and an energy supplier. “We feel that we are no longer just a customer, but a partner working towards the same goals of energy efficiency and cost-effectiveness,” says Rob Furlan, TD Centre’s director of operations.

For lists of other buildings using district energy service, see the District Energy Space section of IDEA’s Web site at www.districtenergy.org/de_space.html.