Using sewer heat energy for heating and cooling in a low carbon community

Sen̓áḵw District Energy System

At the scale of a new urban district, the most important design decisions happen early. For Sen̓áḵw, a mixed‑use development planned to deliver 11 towers and 6,000 new homes, Creative Energy Ventures Limited Partnership set an ambitious goal to provide reliable, low‑carbon heating and cooling that could support phased construction while performing over the long term. The dense site, proximity to Vancouver’s municipal sewer infrastructure, and need for operational resilience made energy planning a defining challenge.

From the outset, our team approached the project from a design perspective, shaping an energy strategy around performance, adaptability, and future growth. Early collaboration across architecture, mechanical, electrical, structural, and controls disciplines informed key decisions about system hierarchy, redundancy, and staging.

Prioritizing recovered and recycled energy, the district energy system captures waste heat from the adjacent sewer network, extracts and reuses the energy through utility-scale heat pumps and distributes it across the development. Designing the energy center and energy transfer stations as an integrated system helped support seamless operation during phased build out.

The resulting district energy system delivers 26 megawatts of heating and 12 megawatts of cooling, reducing emissions while supporting flexibility and reliability. Low carbon strategies will result in an estimated reduction of 4,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually (compared to a gas boiler baseline) from the district, and 30 percent annual energy savings. The system is designed to expand capacity and interconnect with Creative Energy’s downtown Vancouver network.

Sen̓áḵw’s district energy system demonstrates how early, integrated design thinking can shape resilient infrastructure—and set a strong foundation for new urban communities.