Not just for mice
Engineering Excellence
It’s just part of the service.
For the past several years, DEC has been at the leading edge of District Energy Sharing System design and execution. The inspiration for DEC’s revolutionary, low-temperature, energy-sharing innovations stems from 30 years experience designing and developing efficient building systems.
DEC design philosophy has always been about balance – a balanced building system that maximizes shared heating and cooling energy requires the least amount of energy input. And now, DEC has been able to apply building-balancing techniques on a community-wide scale, minimizing total community energy requirements. The end result is the most advanced District Energy Sharing System design in the world.
DEC is a full-service mechanical engineering firm which has undertaken a wide variety of projects in its home province of British Columbia, across Canada, and around the world. To every project, whether a DESS scheme or a more traditional one, a single building or a whole community, DEC brings the knowledge, experience, and integrity by which it has earned its reputation for excellence and professionalism.
Our Services
- Sustainable master planning
- Infrastructure and energy modeling
- District energy planning
- Capacity and demand planning for energy and water
- Utility design and operations planning
- Capital and operating costing
- Staging planning for continuous sustainable improvement
- Infrastructure planning
- Building system planning and design
- Construction management
- Team creation and co-ordination, from investors to operators
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.
E2O
The Software Behind the Hardware
E2O is DEC’s proprietary suite of software tools designed to enable DEC customers – developers, municipalities, utilities and corporations – to establish a clear path from conventional heating, cooling and water distribution systems to more efficient district systems, including to DEC’s patent-pending District Energy Sharing Systems (DESS). E2O focuses on cost-reduction at all stages: feasibility, design, construction and operation. Among E2O’s comprehensive benefits are the factoring of capital costs across multiple clients; financial risk reduction; profit maximization; and, of course, energy efficiency and conservation.
The unique E2O toolkit can be effectively deployed in situations ranging from legacy system rejuvenation to infrastructure re-purpose and expansion to new system conception and realization. And E2O is effective in developing the unique business case necessary to justify and sustain each proposed solution.
With E2O, executives receive clear, concise, relevant information delivered in the timely, organized and actionable manner necessary for effective decision-making.
