UBC Okanagan CHP/MDES/LDES Interconnect

CURA was engaged by UBC Okanagan to complete the interconnection of the Central Heat Plant to an existing dormant 440m twinned supply and return underground heating pipeline that had been installed in 2017/2018.  We provided a fully integrated design team to UBC Okanagan consisting of Prime/Managing Consultant, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineers and Structural Engineers for the project.

The project scope included the design and installation of piping within the Central Heat Plant, water treatment filtration, expansion tanks, pumping, energy metering and variable frequency drives.  All of the work was completed during a summer shutdown requiring close coordination of major equipment/material deliveries with integration into other projects occurring simultaneously at the delivery end of the pipeline to connect the Geoexchange Control Facility into the campus’ central hot water heating utility.

Innovative features include the ability of the District Energy pipeline to harvest low grade return water energy from Legacy Buildings on campus and re-feed that low-temperature heat to the new pipeline.  Other features include the ability of the condensing boilers to modulate and switch between cold and hot return ports to increase fuel-to-heat utilization and efficiency of the natural gas fuel.

CURA also provided post-startup support during the first winter of operation in the form of remotely monitoring the campus’ building automation system and automation data/trend logs to ensure that the HVAC automation system was optimized to feed heating energy into the campus’ other district energy system, the Low Temperature District Energy System *; an ambient heating/cooling utility serving approximately 1.5 million ft2 on campus that uses distributed water to water heat pumps for building heating/cooling, also designed by Mr. Hutchison.