Energy developer says Willamette water could power Portland
Daily Journal of Commerce
by Libby Tucker
07/30/2007
Portland startup MidTech Energy is partnering with a St. Paul, Minn.-based energy developer on a proposal to heat and cool downtown Portland using Willamette River water.
Market Street Energy Co., which developed the biomass-powered system that heats and cools 80 percent of St. Paul’s downtown buildings, has zeroed in on Portland and Honolulu for its next big renewable energy projects.
“I’ve visited in Portland, and I’m excited about the potential there,” Anders Rydaker, chief manager of Market Street Energy, said. “It’s a forward-looking city and a city that really cares about sustainability and renewable energy.”
The proposal for a district energy system, which uses heat exchanged from an underground network of water pipes to heat or cool buildings in a given neighborhood, is not new to Portland.
Downtown’s Brewery Blocks also run a similar district cooling system, built by Portland Energy Solutions, a former Enron subsidiary. That project, which uses city water cycled through cooling towers at a central plant, never expanded beyond five blocks after Enron went bankrupt in 2001.
MidTech has a different plan.
“Our big proposal is using the Willamette River as an energy source,” John Sorenson, CEO of MidTech Energy, said.
Beginning in the North Pearl District, the under-development properties above Northwest Lovejoy Street, the company would build a central plant to pump water from the Willamette River and send it through a network of underground pipes to heat or cool buildings before dumping it back to the river.
In the summer the river water is colder than the surrounding air and it sucks up heat to provide a cooling system. In the winter, the cold water could also provide cool air, or a biomass-powered generator could warm the water before it’s sent through the pipes to provide a heating system.
Market Street Energy is developing a similar system for Honolulu that uses cold water drawn from deep in the ocean to essentially air-condition the city.
Portland developers and city officials are warming to the proposal.
“I think (Sorenson’s) got a really interesting concept; his is quite different from what we did at the Brewery Blocks,” Dennis Wilde, a partner in Gerding Edlen Development Co., the Brewery Blocks developer, said. “I think we could operate our downtown a lot more efficiently if we had central plants.”
Wilde cautioned that such a system is expensive to build, “it doesn’t pay big returns right away,” he said. But the potential energy savings are enormous when a single system provides the energy for several buildings in the same area, instead of installing individual systems in each, he said.
The proposal also faces significant regulatory and permitting hurdles in using water from the Willamette, which is closely monitored by state agencies for temperature changes that could affect fish and other wildlife.
“We’re confident it won’t have any negative impact on the river,” Sorenson said. But, he said, until the company completes its due diligence it can’t be certain of “the environmental effects of changing the thermodynamics of the river.”
The Portland Office of Sustainable Development is in the process of finding money to help pay for a feasibility study, estimated to cost about $400,000, Michael Armstrong, deputy director of OSD, said.
But the city has not yet decided how much it will contribute, where the money will come from or whether it will come as a development grant or a loan, Armstrong said.
“We see real potential here at the conceptual level,” Armstrong said. “We’re really interested in this kind of project because it has the potential to deliver big energy savings, and that boils down to jobs.”
The North Pearl is the ideal place to start the project because much of the property is still undeveloped, Sorenson said. MidTech could start from scratch, laying pipes before the buildings go up. And existing buildings could be retrofitted with the system, at a greater cost, he said.
MidTech is proposing a second plant to heat and cool new buildings in the South Waterfront District. And Sorenson envisions that development would continue from the two districts, eventually connecting in the middle and servicing all of downtown.
Once the feasibility study is complete in about three months, permitting is expected to take as long as 18 months with at least another year for construction of the North Pearl system. If all goes according to plan the first station could flip the switch in three years, Rydaker said.
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