Nelson District Energy Feasibility Study

Two potential areas had been identified for assessment, the downtown Lakefront area and the Selkirk college campus. For each of the study areas, a building inventory and the estimated energy loads were summarized. Since all of the potential customer buildings were existing buildings, a high level assessment of the likely current heating system and the level of effort required to retrofit to a District Energy System was made.

Associated Engineering developed a model to analyze various combinations of connected buildings. The model compared the capital costs necessary to provide a central energy plant and to connect all the buildings with District Energy distribution piping against projected revenue from energy sales from those buildings. By repeating this analysis on various “nodes” of the system, the optimum first phase and subsequent phasing of the District Energy System could be determined.