RC119 JulyAugust 2025 - Magazine - Page 15
CREATIVE ENERGY
lems facing Vancouver today, from a health, economic and
aesthetic standpoint, is the pall of smoke which constantly
hangs over the city.” Downtown Vancouver’s pollution,
dependent on coal and fuel oil, was so bad that the constant
haze even a昀昀ected operations of Vancouver International
Airport.
The formation of Central Heat Distribution in 1968 as a
private district energy utility not only helped improve Vancouver’s air quality, but in many respects paved the way for
Vancouver’s current ambitions to become a “green city”—a
role forgotten, or at least, underappreciated by City o昀케cials
as recently as the early 2000s.
By the time that the City of Vancouver published its
“Greenest City Action Plan” in 2011, City o昀케cials were
actively pushing for a low-carbon solution to the provision of heating and cooling for buildings in the downtown
peninsula but were frustrated in their attempts to persuade
Central Heat to modernize and were unsure how to achieve
their low carbon goal. It was therefore a pleasant surprise
when, in 2014, prominent developer Gillespie bought
Central Heat, with the stated intention of transforming the
trusted but outdated utility into a leading proponent for
low carbon energy.
Expansion demonstrates corporate flexibility
Although Central Heat (now Creative Energy) was Vancouver’s 昀椀rst district energy company, it wasn’t the last. By
2000, more than a dozen DE systems of various sizes and
capabilities had come on stream in the Lower Mainland.
(There are currently six hospital DE systems, four university-inspired, three more private projects, and four under
municipal control.) The most in昀氀uential is arguably the municipally owned False Creek Neighbourhood Energy Utility,
which introduced WET technology to North America, using
technology developed by Sharc Energy to capture waste
thermal energy from sewage to provide space heating and
RENEWCANADA.NET
hot water to buildings in the former Olympic Village and
surrounding neighbourhoods.
True to its reinvigorated mandate, Creative Energy has
quickly become a leading innovator with a hospital DE
project in Seattle, several projects in B.C. and two more in
Ontario, displaying extraordinary corporate 昀氀exibility in its
business model.
The company’s projects include a role as subsidiary to
Westbank (the Indigenous-led Sen̓áḵw project utilizing
WET technology in Vancouver); as a limited partner with
another utility for a joint-venture Westbank/QuadReal
redevelopment of the Oakridge shopping mall, also in
Vancouver); as an owner-operator of a closed-loop ocean
exchange system supplying energy to a mixed-use resort
village in the revitalized Sewell’s Marina in Horseshoe Bay;
and an independent partner with Thompson Rivers University and BC Hydro in Kamloops, which will make the
university the 昀椀rst to achieve net-zero. In Ontario, Creative
Energy is Westbank’s DE provider in Mirvish Village and is
acting independently as a provider of low carbon geo-exchange energy to Minto Communities in North Oakville.
With a role in multiple projects in the Creative Energy
pipeline, Tam is philosophical about his workload. “I’ve
worked on many ‘sustainable’ projects in the past. What
attracted me to Creative Energy was an opportunity to make
a bigger impact through our array of neighbourhood-scale
technological solutions from geo-exchange, ocean exchange,
sewer-energy-exchange, to waste-heat recovery, and more.”
Vancouver’s Sen‘ákw, a
rental development by
the Squamish Nation, is
slated to become one
of the first large-scale
zero carbon housing
projects in the world, with
Creative Energy heating
the development with
a sewer-heat recovery
district energy system.
(inset) Construction is
currently underway at the
Sen‘ákw site. Two 400 mm
connections into Metro
Vancouver’s 1200 mm
diameter sewer main
have been successfully
hot tapped, unlocking the
primary heating source for
the development.
JULY/AUGUST 2025 – RENEW CANADA 15
