In the heart of Ottawa, Hemmera is helping a housing community deliver on their mandate of affordable sustainability. We are leading the design for a geoexchange energy system that will provide heating and domestic hot water for the entire community, with three to five times the efficiency of conventional systems, providing long-term savings and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. When completed, it will be the largest system of its type in Canada.
Geoexchange, also known as geothermal heat pump technology, captures the thermal energy that is freely available in the ground under our feet. Our design will provide heated and cooled water for the entire Beaver Barracks complex of five buildings and over 240 residences. For flexibility and reliability, the central plant is designed to offer three choices of energy source: free cooling using an economiser heat exchange, electrical heat pumps, and back-up gas boilers.
The Hemmera team is leading the design for the geoexchange ground loop and the central energy plant. Our designs have introduced many design innovations, notably in the primary and secondary ground loops, and the choice of a newly formulated resin compound in the deep borehole loops that reduces the size of the heat-exchange field.This particular custom design system requires 60 boreholes drilled 137 metres deep, with loop pipes thermally fused into a continuous parallel piping network that forms a single geoexchange field. For greater efficiency,this field feeds a single central energy plant that serves the entire complex.
