Vancouver’s Sewer Heat Waste Recovery System: A Blueprint for Urban Sustainability & Cleantech Innovation
Gregor Robertson was elected Mayor of Vancouver in 2008, touting a vision to make the City of Glass the greenest city on the planet. Of the many sustainability initiatives Gregor championed, his work with Sharc Energy and its founder, Lynn Mueller, was among the most innovative. Reclaiming heat from underground sewer pipes is a supercool way to produce clean, local energy and a novel climate innovation whose time has come: Cities around the world can take advantage of the zero-carbon heat flowing beneath their buildings.
One of the most significant challenges facing cities worldwide is the energy consumption associated with heating and cooling buildings (accounting for 15% of global carbon emissions). Vancouver tackled this issue head-on by harnessing an unexpected, constantly replenished, renewable resource: its wastewater.
To develop Sharc Energy’s groundbreaking sewer heat waste recovery technology, Lynn Mueller embarked on a global of tour sewers, visiting sewer systems from Albania to Beijing. Now installed in Vancouver’s False Creek neighborhood, Sharc Energy’s system is revolutionizing how cities heat and cool their buildings.
Snapshot
- In 2008, under the leadership of Mayor Gregor Robertson, Vancouver set out to become the world’s greenest city, championing new policies and climate innovations.
- In the city’s False Creek neighborhood, the SHARC sewer waste heat recovery system now provides zero-emission heating to over 6,000 apartments and 2.7 million square feet of building space, with more expansion underway.
- It’s so successful that the Neighborhood Energy Utility in False Creek is a profit center for the city, providing a return on investment to taxpayers and keeping energy rates affordable for customers.
- Today, Vancouver has the lowest carbon emissions per capita of any city in North America.
Listen to Gregor and Lynn on the Supercool Podcast
Sewer Heat Recovery in False Creek
Above: The waterfront neighborhood of False Creek in Vancouver.
The False Creek project exemplifies Vancouver’s innovative green strategy and provides a model for public-private collaboration. By transforming a former industrial area into a thriving residential and commercial district, the city demonstrated its commitment to sustainable urban development and high livability standards. The installation of Sharc Energy’s wastewater heat recovery system into this new neighborhood showcased how innovative technologies can seamlessly integrate into urban infrastructure.
Above: Vancouver’s adoption of Sharc’s technology provides affordable carbon-free energy to over 6,000 apartments and 2.7 million square feet of building space.
Beyond the technical achievements, Vancouver’s success also results from a strong emphasis on community engagement and collaboration. The city involved residents in developing the Greenest City Action Plan, fostering a sense of ownership and shared responsibility. This approach built consensus among Mayor Robertson’s constituents and created the foundation for striving toward the city’s ambitious sustainability goals.
Gregor Robertson’s leadership was instrumental in advancing Vancouver’s climate agenda. His ability to galvanize support, build partnerships, and overcome challenges inherent to fostering new technologies and funding bold initiatives harkens back to his experience as an entrepreneur, having started a kindred company in the food and beverage industry, Happy Planet.
Given his ventures in the health & wellness industry, it’s no surprise that transportation and cycling were also focal points of his administration, creating the Seaside Greenway, now Vancouver’s most popular bike path, which runs through downtown and out to famed Jericho Beach, including a reclaimed traffic lane across the Burrard Bridge.
Above: Vancouver’s Seaside Greenway bicycling toward Jericho Beach
Gregor Robertson and the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy
By creating a vision of a sustainable future and inspiring others to join the journey, Mayor Robertson helped position Vancouver as a global leader in climate action.
Rapid urbanization and the growing frequency of extreme weather events highlight the urgency of addressing climate change in cities. Vancouver’s experience offers valuable lessons for other cities. After two successful reelection campaigns and a third term in office, Gregor found a new role in helping mayors worldwide go green, build resiliency, and move toward a more sustainable future.
To accelerate climate progress, cities must continue to innovate and adopt new technologies from founders like Lynn Mueller. The wastewater heat recovery system is just one example of the potential for harnessing unconventional energy sources (see our coverage of low-carbon automated underground waste collection systems).
Collaboration between cities is also crucial. By sharing knowledge, best practices, and resources, cities learn from each other and accelerate progress. Networks like the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy facilitate this exchange.
While cities are leading on climate action, they can’t do it all alone. National governments must provide the necessary support, including financial resources, policies, and regulations. As Gregor puts it, thousands of cities around the globe are working right now to create and strengthen their climate action plans:
“We want those plans to be more ambitious. And right now, only about a quarter of them have significant, what we call, urban content, and where the countries say we’re going to work with these cities on climate impacts. We’re going to make sure we take action. This is how we’re going to do that. And this is how we get our decarbonization goals.”
Gregor is motivated by the combination of decarbonizing cities—primarily buildings, transportation, and waste systems—in his work as Special Envoy for the Coalition for High Ambition Multi-Level Partnerships (CHAMP), which represents 13,000 cities.
Sharc Energy Founder, Lynn Mueller
Following a lengthy, varied career as a mechanic, engineer, and consultant to local real estate developers, Lynn founded Sharc Energy and pioneered its wastewater heat recycling technology. As Lynn recounted on the Supercool podcast, he began his career with The Hudson Bay Company, which operated fur trading posts around the Northwest Territories and up into the Arctic.
“My job then with them was on a contract; it was to go and put fur freezers in these outposts because they couldn’t keep the furs frozen over the summer 40 years ago. The summer had got too long to keep them covered in ice.”
Given the changing climate’s influence on his early career, it’s no surprise that he eventually turned to developing solutions. He draws unique insights into the core challenges surrounding heating and cooling. As Lynn said, the most significant environmental challenge caused by heated water spiraling down the drain and into sewers is that it eventually spills into oceans.
Lynn’s entrepreneurial prowess is equal to his commitment to sustainability.
“The business case was you throw the heat away, I get it for free, and it only costs me 20 cents on the dollar to put it back into your hot water tank, and I can [still] charge you a dollar for it. So the margin was fantastic.”
Lynn explained the opportunity as it applies to larger cities like New York, where 1.4 billion gallons of sewage are created daily and flow through sewer pipes at a temperature of 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit). If the city took just one degree of heat back from that volume of sewage flow, the net positive cash flow would be $3 million an hour.
That’s big business.
Sharc’s wastewater heat recovery system can also be used to cool space. At DC Water’s administration headquarters, Sharc installed one of its systems. It’s a 150,000 square feet LEED Platinum-certified, modern, all-glass building where the air conditioning runs 95% of the year. What transpired when the building opened caught Lynn by surprise.
Above: The modern, green, all-glass DC Water Adminsistration HQ
“We thought we had something screwed up, sensors or something. So we sent the team down and now the building’s just always air conditioning. But we saved them approximately three million gallons of water a year the cooling towers would have used. So it’s kind of a catch-all system for heating and cooling.”
Sharc’s operations in Vancouver and elsewhere show that sewer heat recovery systems are a viable source of carbon-free energy. This climate solution is available to every city on the planet because the sewers flow underneath them all.
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