City of Powell River Council will consider two projects at Powell River Recreation Complex that will provide cost savings and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
At the April 29 council meeting, manager of recreation Neil Pukesh outlined a thermal energy study that contained three recommendations for improvements.
The first was that the city reallocate $175,000 from the 2019 capital plan for a boiler replacement toward installation of a heating system upgrade. The second is to approve a grant application to FortisBC to fund $104,138 toward the heating system upgrade. The final measure would be to approve $81,308 from the community works fund to complete the upgrade project.
Pukesh said in the 2019 capital plan, as part of the city’s asset management program, it was calling for replacement of one of the recreation complex boilers, which is past its estimated useful life.
“It’s a bit of an energy hog,” said Pukesh. “We had $175,000 approved last May. After finding we did get approval, our sustainability planner caught wind of an exciting project to do a thermal energy study at the recreation complex. We want to find ways to reduce operating costs at the facility.
“We put this boiler replacement project on pause and started to go down this path to explore this thermal energy study.”
Pukesh said the study will be funded by FortisBC. In September 2019 the sustainability planner brought forward a request to council to allocate $28,000 from the climate action reserve fund to conduct the study. Upon completion, Fortis would fund 50 per cent and the remaining 50 per cent would also be funded by Fortis if recommendations were implemented.
In the fall of 2019, an engineering company was hired to conduct the study. Pukesh said the engineering firm came back in March of this year with three recommendations.
The first is a heating system upgrade that would have estimated cost savings of $30,000 per year. The second recommendation was the optimization of the digital control system, which would bring annual cost savings of $25,000.
The third was an ice plant heat recovery project, with estimated annual cost savings of $54,000.
“There’s three really exciting projects that they brought forward to us,” said Pukesh. “The heating system upgrade we were looking at doing was budgeted at $175,000 for the boiler replacement. We are asking to reallocate that money toward this project because, through this energy study, FortisBC has come to the table with $104,000 in funding for this capital upgrade.
“This is really exciting for us. That is going to cut back the payback return on this project to 1.6 years. It’s really a no-brainer.”
Pukesh said to finish off funding for the projects, an additional $81,308 would be required from the community works fund.
FortisBC would not fund the ice plant heat recovery project. Estimated project cost is $1.5 million and the city will be looking at grant opportunities to fund it.
According to Pukesh, in order to qualify for the $104,000 offer from Fortis, acceptance of its offer by the city must be provided by May 21, 2020, and all projects must be completed within 18 months.
Councillor CaroleAnn Leishman, chair of the city’s climate change mitigation and adaptation committee, said her committee is all about reducing carbon emissions, which the proposed projects do many times over, but what’s also an important factor is how much money the upgrades would save the city.
According to a staff report, implementation of the two projects would result in a reduction of 223 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.
Mayor Dave Formosa said he’d had a tour of the facilities in the recreation complex. He added that the returns on investment are excellent.
The staff report stated the installation of a more efficient boiler, low temperature pool heat exchangers and reconfiguration of mechanical control systems would result in annual cost savings of $55,267, and would save the city $728,675 over the next 25 years.
Council will vote on the recommendations at its May 7 meeting.
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