A frequently-idle pair of steam and power plants at Exhibition Place in Toronto will finally be fully used when a new hotel, timed for the 2015 Pan Am Games, is ready for use.
Toronto City Council approved a capital expenditure of $4.5 million in July to connect the 1.6 MW facility to the planned hotel. The plant will also be connected to existing event facilities including the Ricoh Coliseum, Coliseum Complex, Direct Energy Centre and the Allstream Centre, all at the eastern end of Exhibition Place. Council authorized Exhibition Place, or its owner the City of Toronto, to enter into an energy services agreement with Princes Gates Hotel Limited Partnership for the supply of thermal energy.
The development was identified in a March 2011 report that found 27 energy density nodes around the city that are potentially worth exploring as local district energy centres. The city’s Energy and Strategic Initiatives Group developed in-depth business cases for three of those, and settled on the connection of the trigen facility as the highest priority to begin with. (The other two cases included a neighbourhood expecting multi-use growth over the next 10 years, and a brownfield site.)
“Cogen is a critical part,” said Group Director Jim Baxter, explaining the city’s priority ranking rationale. “As we develop our business cases we start with the electrical situation, which is that we’re jammed for capacity. Physically, it starts with the thermal loop, connecting buildings together for heating and cooling. We’re technology agnostic – once the loop is in place, then it could be gas boilers, it could be biomass, or CHP.” In the case of the facility at the Allstream Centre, the facility is already in existence and essentially all that’s needed is the connection to the hotel. While the facility could always have been used to supply power to the grid, the opportunity to provide heat as well as cooling, if desired, improves the economics.