First Canadian Place: Chilling Energy Use - Equipment UpgradeAug. 10, 2009 First Canadian Place: Chilling energy use - Equipment upgrade Source: Alexandra Lopez-Pacheco, Financial Post Published: Friday, August 07, 2009 On any given work day, about 84,000 people walk through First Canadian Place in downtown Toronto. Some 10,000 of them work in the 72-storey office building, while the rest are frequenting the more than 150 stores and restaurants below. All those people -- all that body heat --pose a problem for the managers of Canada's largest commercial building. They have to pay particular attention to the building's chillers -- the large units that are used to regulate the air temperature. "One of the largest energy consumers in a building is the chiller," says Stefan Demdinski, senior vice-president of asset management for Eastern Canada at Brookfield Properties, which owns the building. "They are used to cool the building and, unfortunately, in a tower such as First Canadian Place, there's often a lot more cooling than heating going on." The chillers were installed when the tower was built in the early 1970s. There are three banks of the units in the lower level (to cool the first 50 floors of the tower) and another set on the top level to cover the remaining 22 floors. They were always well-maintained but, even so, they guzzled electricity. And, unlike cooling systems in homes, which are only used during the hot summer months, chillers in the type of towers found in urban centres typically run year-round. That had to change -- one chiller at a time -- and Brookfield Properties knew it. It has already replaced the top bank of chillers and is on schedule to replace all of them by 2010. Indeed, through a series of retrofits on everything from lighting to its cooling equipment, First Canadian Place has already reduced its electricity consumption by 18 million kilowatt hours. From the perspective of the environment and greenhouse gas emissions, that's the equivalent of taking 1,646 vehicles off the road each year. The company's challenge and its response is familiar to the Building Owners and Managers Association Toronto, whose 725 members representing 350 companies manage more than 150-million square feet of industrial, commercial and institutional properties in the Greater Toronto Area. "You have large heat producers in that type of real estate," says Wayne Proulx, who, as BOMA Toronto's program director, runs its conservation and demand management program. The objective is to reduce the demand on Toronto's electrical supply by 150 megawatts over the next three years. "You have people, who produce heat, you have equipment and, over the last 15 years, an increasing amount of technology such as computers and printers, which also produce heat," Mr. Proulx says. "As well, the capacity of people on a floor has increased considerably, which means you have greater heat production, and that means you need more cooling." The demand is highest during the summer months when urban cores, with all their heat absorbing materials and heat-producing sources, become "heat islands." It's a vicious circle -- one that needs to be broken for the environment, energy conservation and cost reduction in operating costs. "There's going to come a time, and it's already happening to some extent, when the reputations of building owners who are perceived as not doing anything will be affected, and that can have a financial impact," Mr. Proulx says. "They might have to absorb more cost now to become more energy-efficient but in the long run, it's going to save them money and make them more competitive in an increasingly greening marketplace." Energy retrofits --including the new chillers -- can seem a daunting investment for many building owners but BOMA Toronto's CDM program can help reduce the capital cost by up to 40%. This $60-million fund is being delivered by BOMA Toronto through the Ontario Power Authority and is designed to provide incentives to building owners and tenants to conduct electricity conservation projects. "Out of 399 projects, we have about 50 projects that are cooling related," Mr. Proulx says. He says there are several new towers being built that have focused on being green, which results in lower operating costs because of the energy efficiency. But that, he says, puts a greater strain on the remaining buildings in the marketplace. "They're competing with these people now, so a tenant can choose to move into a building and pay marginally more on the net rent but save more than that on the operating costs because of the efficiency. And that leaves existing buildings finding it more and more a requirement to become more energy-efficient. We can help them by providing them with incentives. It just makes a whole lot of sense to do it." The City of Hamilton came to that conclusion last year while looking to replace its 14 aging chillers, not just with energy-efficient ones but with a looped system to provide district cooling to its downtown core. This allowed the city to cut back to only 11 chillers. "We started construction in March and we had the chiller plant running in May," says Jim Hickey, senior project manager of Energy Engineering Public Works, Office of Energy Initiatives for the City of Hamilton. "We still have about 25% of the work left but the main buildings are all being cooled by the new chillers." The new system will reduce the energy use for cooling by some 41% and already has removed 556 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year. "This complements the downtown business renewal program," says Rom D'Angelo, manager of corporate buildings and technical services in Public Works. |