Owner / Operator: ENWIN Utilities Ltd., Enwave Energy Corp.
Year: 1997
System Highlights
- 5,600 tons cooling, 7410 ton/hrs of ice storage
- Over 1,000 trench meters of buried heating and cooling pipe in downtown Windsor
Greater reliability for Downtown Windsor with District Energy
Windsor Utilities Commission selected FVB Energy to provide a variety of business development, marketing and engineering services for the Windsor District Energy System (DES). The Windsor DES started operations in 1997, and provides cooling and heating services to the Casino Windsor, as well as government and commercial buildings in downtown Windsor. ENWIN Utilities Ltd. Owned and operated the system from 1997-2021, after which it was sold to Enwave Energy Corporation.
Windsor District Energy System was North America’s first District Energy System to combine the use of hot water district heating, district cooling and ice thermal storage. The cooling plant has a capacity of 5,660 tons including thermal energy storage. Ice thermal energy storage is used to enable peak power demand load shifting with 7,410 ton-hours of ice-on-coil thermal storage. The heating plant has a capacity of 20 MWt hot water and 5.8 MWt steam (150 psig), and is capable of running on either fuel oil or natural gas. Hot water is distributed to multiple buildings in the community and steam is used internally by the Casino Windsor. Additionally, the steam plant is capable of backing up the hot water plant during an emergency.
The heating and cooling central plant, including the ice water storage tank and fuel oil storage tanks, were installed in the basement of the Casino Windsor. The design required careful piping and layout planning due to the base building schedule, tight spaces of the plant. The Windsor plant was built in a roughly pie-shaped space that complicated installation due to the non-standard angles which created difficulty when laying out piping. Boiler and emergency generator stacks had to be routed through a mechanical shaft, up 21 floors to the roof of the Casino Windsor hotel tower. FVB worked closely with its Noise & Acoustic and Structural subconsultants and the base building designers to ensure vibration and noise criteria where met. Large, 24-inch, condenser water piping had to be routed through an underground tunnel and through a mechanical shaft, up 6 floors to the roof top of a parking garage where the cooling towers were installed. The plant design also included 3 x 1,250 kWe oil fired emergency generators + 3 days of oil storage to service the 4,160 V switchgear for the Casino and the Energy Centre. It remains a reference for FVB’s work on tightly constrained heating, cooling, and emergency power plants.
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Keywords
Ice Storage, System Profile, Energy Centre, DPS, ETS