Development
District Energy
District Energy is on-site generation scaled up from building-wide to community-wide production and distribution. DE systems produce steam, hot water or chilled water at a local central plant and pipe the thermal energy to buildings in the district for space heating, domestic hot water and air conditioning. In many cases, waste heat is recovered to generate electricity, essentially creating neighborhood-scale Co-Generation. District Energy eliminates the need for individual building boilers or furnaces and chillers or air conditioners. The advantages are numerous and can be very profitable:
- Fuel flexibility: DE systems can exploit the most competitive fuel at the time (coal, oil, natural gas) or easily transition whole communities to biomass, geothermal or other renewable fuel supplies
- Pollution mitigation: individual buildings can eliminate CFCs, cooling towers and water treatment chemicals, as well as the "refrigerant compliance" paperwork, regulations and bureaucracy of conventional systems
- Reduced building capital costs and space requirements: money and space normally dedicated to boilers and chillers are freed for other valuable purposes
- Reliability: round-the-clock professional operators and backup systems typically mean "five nines" (99.999%) uptime
Endurant Development is actively pursuing the design and deployment of District Energy systems with a number of innovative property owners in conjunction with its on-site power and Co-Gen developments. DE development makes for natural synergies with the work our Solutions group is doing, along with the International District Energy Association and others, to engage and educate property owners, facility managers and campus administrators on the benefits of District Energy.