DESS

District Energy Sharing System.

Saving Energy. Saving Water. Saving Money.

At the forefront of engineering sustainability, DEC has pioneered and developed a patent-pending system called District Energy Sharing System (DESS). A DESS is a low-temperature, shared-resource system that uses a dual-pipe network to distribute thermal energy and water across a community.

The benefits of DEC’s District Energy Sharing System versus traditional systems are impressive: 50% reduction in externally-sourced energy requirements; 50% reduction in externally-sourced water requirements; significantly reduced infrastructure capital, construction and operating costs; and significantly reduced environmental impact.

Sharing: the Key to Saving

It’s a question of balance, of using the surplus energy from one location on the network to meet the energy deficit of another. A DESS acts to provide on-demand heating and cooling where needed, and to recapture and redistribute the excess thermal energy normally rejected by the heating and cooling processes. Thermal energy from non-traditional sources throughout the community – waste-water treatment facilities, ice rinks, data centres, refrigeration plants – can be exploited by connecting them to the network. As a DESS expands, grids are built to optimize the balancing of heating and cooling loads across a community. New energy sources on each additional grid, evaluated in terms of how well they help to balance swings in heating and cooling demands, provide increased energy-source redundancy. Often this means smaller, more localized sources can be effectively used. This technique provides for infrastructure construction and energy-source integration to be staged in a manner that reflects the scale and phase of development. The goal is to achieve net-zero energy consumption across the community, even though each structure or node on the network may not itself be a net-zero structure.

Further, the dual-pipe architecture of the network is designed to support the distribution of reclaimed, clean effluent for non-potable water uses such as toilet flushing, irrigation, and laundry. Ultimately, a DESS creates the backbone with which an environmentally balanced community can grow by enabling cost effective use of modern sustainable technologies.

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