Looking back at 2022, one of my favorite moments was attending the groundbreaking for the largest emissions reduction project in UHN history! This groundbreaking was the culmination of years of hard work by the Energy and Environment team, including raising climate change as a health care issue and advocating for climate action, working on various incremental projects and gaining experience with power purchase business models, and of course all the hard work directly developing the Wastewater Energy Transfer project itself. The project is well underway and will soon be providing clean heating and cooling to the Toronto Western Hospital campus, drastically reducing emissions from the existing gas-fired central steam plant at the campus.

But what if I told you that the City of Toronto has developed a tool to help determine whether your facility could also benefit from such a system? Well they have! Our fearless leader, Ed, recently told me about the “Wastewater Energy Map” and it has an amazing amount of info. You can check out your location to see if this clean energy resource is available:

Wastewater Energy Map – City of Toronto

Below is a screen shot where I just searched “Yonge and Bloor” and a quick perusal suggests there is potential to recover sewer heat in many areas of the city.

A few other highlights of my 2022:

  • attended my first live conference since the pandemic began. CHES 2022 was certainly a big morale boost for me as it was clear that climate action is front and center for many in the health care engineering community
  • hit over 2000km of active travel after a beautiful December for bike weather (made good use of UHN’s bike storage)
    • added a bundle of joy to my family (gonna need a bigger bike)

    I hope you have a chance to look back on your achievements and look forward to the challenges ahead! Happy New Year!