A MetaFilter post links to several information resources on Toronto's new innovative downtown cooling system, which pumps near-freezing water from Lake Ontario's deeps through the city's office-towers, eliminating 40,000 tons of CO2 pollution per annum (no word on whether there's an environmental impact to pumping the atmosphere-warmed water back into the lake). Toronto's had centralised steam-heat for decades — a system where steam radiators in the city's office-towers are all filled with hot vapour from the same centralised plant, a curious species of public utility that truly makes all of the office towers (which contain bitter rivals and competitors) into a single, linked, cooperative system.
As I type this (but not as you read it — this is being posted on a several-day delay), I am sitting just a few metres from the Toronto Island Water Filtration Plant, where the water-pumping takes place. The plant has a lot more barbed wire and fences than it did this time last year: I guess I know why now.
Update: Michael Kalus notes, "the way this system
works is that the water is pulled out of Lake Ontario, then at the
John Street pumping station is fed through a head exchanger that cools
the office building. The "warm" water is then cleaned and used as
drinking water in Toronto, not just merely dumped back into the lake.
"In essence nothing has changed from before, only that the water is now
pulled out of a deeper part of the lake and I am no environmentalist,
but I would guess that the impact on the lake is neglectable as there
is already a huge volume of water taken out of the lake anyways."
