The Richmond News had this somewhere in its folds as pointed out by Coins. Harold Steves. This sort of solution to energy needs has been floated hereabouts as well following some visits to the Ocean Discovery Centre a decade ago. This system is essentially a rather large heating/cooling exchange system (an oversized heat pump) based on the rather constant temperature of soil below the surface, or, in this case, water that is in a body large enough that it doesn’t freeze. Even at low temperatures, there is enough energy to extract that it’s worth the cost of pumping and exchange to heat and/or cool a building, or, as in the Richmond case, a whole neighbourhood. An early-on interview with the ODC in Sidney elicited the cost of the upgrade being less than $1m and the payback being on the order of five years, with the additional benefit of providing copious quantities of Saanich Inlet sea water to maintain the various life forms constituting the displays at the centre on top of the HVAC energy for the retail and residential units that make up the bulk of the structure.
Sadly, the idea has landed consistently with the same dull thud of a river rock landing in a bed of shoe-sucking mud with the seeming perspective that we can’t have a district heating initiative without burning something, a kind of tunnel vision that often accompanies the senescent attitude that seems to pervade most of the apparatus of local government and often seems to spread like a plague to the youngers as they move toward olders in association with those self-same olders. Steves seems to have avoided this altogether, having, if I’m not mistaken, been one of the early proponents of the ALR back in1972, and seemingly having kept that fresh perspective right up to the present, thereby earning the designation of Elder rather than older, as distinguished by a large dollop of accumulated wisdom.
Couns. Steves cites this as a reason to put a stake through the black heart of the Site C project. wherein he once again lands on the right side of history. Bravo, and good on him for doing what he can to ensure that there will be further history on whose right side there will be a place for those who follow in his footsteps.