MIPDCES / ICE-Harvest
McMaster Engineering’s ICE-Harvest research project provides a path forward for a low carbon future. The ICE-Harvest project is a research co-operative led by McMaster involving over 30 municipalities and 19 Industrial Partners, of which HCE Energy is the lead industrial partner, primary district energy provider and a key contributor. ICE-Harvest through a holistic energy approach focuses on resiliency, efficiency and energy utilization to reduce carbon impact.
An ICE-Harvest strategy addresses core climate change issues including adaptation, mitigation, resiliency and innovation and would add:
• Energy sharing between buildings in the MIPDCES (one building’s cooling is the source of heat for another building) through the use of high efficiency heat pumps.
• Seasonal high temperature thermal ground storage using a comparatively shallower and compact borehole field (summer’s cooling energy is winter’s heating energy).
• Short-term thermal storage (balance daily heating and cooling).
• High-efficiency electrical and thermal energy generation (Combined Heat and Power (CHP) / COGEN / TRIGEN), and
• Renewable electrical power generation and storage (Solar PV and batteries).
Most importantly, ICE-Harvest will provide the patented control strategies and systems based on machine learning and artificial intelligence to allow the integration of MIP’s micro thermal grids and micro electrical grids comprising the MIPDCES with the Provincial Grid
The expansion of McMaster Innovation Park is planned to take place in a phased manner over the next several years. Along with the expansion of the Park, the MIPDCES will be expanded to provide the necessary heating, cooling and electrical infrastructure for the Park. Growth of the MIPDCES in parallel with the Park will ensure a resilient system with the necessary redundancies in a cost-effective manner that sees spending patterns in lock step with actual facility growth. It is envisioned that this growth will however be modular to ensure that economies of scale are optimized.
The following key principles will be applied to ensure that the value of the MIPDCES is maximized and that MIP’s carbon impact is minimized:
• All buildings will be connected to the MIPDCES
• All buildings will draw any of their incremental heat requirements from the MIPDCES.
• All buildings will reject any waste heat to the MIPDCES, and
• All buildings will be designed to minimize their electrical use (maximum conservation / highest efficiency). As allowed by regulation and Alectra, electricity for the buildings / facilities must be in a campus style arrangement allowing for maximum Behind the Meter Generation (BMG).
Over time, these key principles will be refined, codified in a Design Basis document and adapted to ensure that MIP remains on a path of low carbon impact.
The next expansion of the MIPDCES will be to accommodate the addition of three facilities - ETC1, Biotech and the Hotel. This expansion will build on the existing foundation of the MIPDCES, but instead of simply adding conventional carbon-intensive heating and conventional refrigeration cooling to meet the expanded buildings’ needs, it will transform MIPDCES into an ICE-Harvest Ready state.
This transformation will:
• Expand the existing MIPDCES system to provide centralized hydronic heating and cooling to the new buildings and maintain loops for the heating and cooling for the Park.
• Enable the sharing of heating and cooling between buildings through the installation and use of centralized Heat Pump or Heat Recovery Chiller (HRC) systems. Heat extracted from one building through cooling will be utilized in another building to meet its heating needs carbon free. The year-round cooling loads associated with an innovation and research center make this possible and advantageous.
• Optimize the use of the existing geothermal-exchange field and heat pump systems. This will allow storage of some of the excess heat for use at other times, and
• Reduce the carbon footprint associated with the heating and cooling of the additional facilities as compared to employing conventional technologies.
In this ICE-Harvest Ready state:
• HRC systems capable of meeting the new buildings peak demand for cooling will be added to the MIP-BEAM Utility room. They will be electrically driven and powered by either the Grid or the Beam CHP Island microgrid.
It is anticipated that these HRC systems will see prime duty and be used to meet within their capacity, the overall cooling needs of the Park. As the cooling needs of the Park increase and exceed the capacity of the new HRC systems, existing heat pumps and other existing refrigeration chillers will be utilized to meet the Parks’ needs. Overall, the Park will continue to have redundant chilling assets to meet its peak cooling demand.
Heat removed from the chilled water supply side of new HRC systems will be recovered by the hot water supply side of the MIPDCES and be utilized to meet the heating load of the MIPDCES. As the heating loads of the MIPDCES change with the season and weather, excess heat will need to be stored in the existing geothermal-exchange field for later withdrawal utilizing the existing heat pumps in Atrium to meet heating requirements of the MIPDCES.
Excess heat that cannot be used immediately or stored in the existing geothermal-exchange field will be wasted to atmosphere through existing cooling tower infrastructure or additional assets. The carbon penalty associated with this loss of usable heat will need to be absorbed and addressed in the future.
• An overall heat balance will be performed to determine if additional heating capacity is required to be added to meet the peak demands of the new buildings. If the balance, including necessary redundancy, indicates that additional heating capacity is required then an assessment will be made to determine the best form of this additional heating capacity considering efficiency, cost and carbon impact, and
• Electrical load will be increased in the West of Longwood Road part of the Park. This will assist in loading of the CHP and either increase its operating hours or move this part of the Park into an Alectra Class A rate-class allowing for participation in the IESO ICI program. If participation in the ICI program is achieved, then a strategy of peak shaving with the CHP and load management will be put in place to reduce load contribution to the top-five Ontario Peaks with a corresponding reduction in Global Adjustment charges and carbon impact.
Incorporation of the existing Hamilton Spectator Building to the Park provides additional opportunities for the MIPDCES. Dependent upon the usage and load profiles, the Spectator Building may have the capability to be a valuable heat source or heat sink for the MIPDCES. If a data center or other high cooling requirement use is sited at the Spectator Building it would become a source of high value low carbon heat energy that would otherwise be wasted to the atmosphere. Connection to the MIPDCES will not be simple, however by district energy standards the building will be within connection distance. It will be important that any modifications to the HVAC systems of the Spectator Building done as part of its renovation to a research / innovation space are done in such a manner that the building can be connected and utilize the MIPDCES. In other words, the HVAC systems will need to mirror the design considerations of the main campus of MIP.
To reduce the Carbon Footprint further, through capturing and reusing the waste heat lost to the atmosphere as a result of limited geothermal-exchange storage, as well as accommodate the need for additional heating and cooling capacity to match further expansion and build out of the Park, MIPDCES will evolve to an ICE-Harvest System.
This evolution will:
• Add seasonal high temperature shallow well geothermal storage.
• Add short term hot and chilled water storage to meet daily load fluctuations.
• Continue to add HRC systems to supply the heating and cooling demands of new buildings and facilities.
• Add high-efficient heating sources (including CHP units as required) to meet any residual heating demands of the system.
• Add additional BMG electrical sources (renewable and other high-efficiency sources) to lower the carbon impact of electricity use at the Park.
• Add electrical storage for resiliency as well as maximization of generation efficiency of BMG electrical energy resources, and
• Add advanced control strategies and protocols to manage the low-carbon MIPDCES to ensure minimum GHG effluents and the lowest carbon impact.
It should be noted that ICE-Harvest while integrating and optimizing the micro thermal and electrical grids of MIP takes a very holistic view of the grid with respect to efficiency, energy utilization and carbon / GHG reduction.
The high efficiency cogeneration incorporated in the ICE-Harvest system not only provides resiliency and a source of high quality waste heat, it is run primarily in a mode to offset lower efficiency Grid natural gas generation which results in an overall reduction of carbon at the Provincial level.
ICE-Harvest management and integration of the MIP micro thermal and electrical grids also allows MIP to be grid responsive allowing a higher level of renewable and carbon free generation to be utilized by the Provincial Grid. Other benefits to the Provincial Grid such as voltage and frequency stabilization as well as basic resiliency will also be provided by the ICE-Harvest solution.
The incorporation of the existing electrical vehicle infrastructure as well as future electrical charging stations into the MIP micro electrical grid will provide the basis for future V2G applications.