Surrey council OKs $5.8M contract for heat downtown
Published 11:45 pm Monday, May 11, 2026
Surrey council awarded a $5,785,259.76 contract to SHARC Energy to supply, and maintain for one year, three new district energy sewer heat recovery units for the city’s new facility.
Approved Monday, the spending limit is set at $6,075,000. Scott Neuman, Surrey’s general manager of engineering, said the units are expected to be supplied within 32 weeks and installed by Fall 2028.
Surrey’s District Energy Utility so far provides heat and hot water to 49 multi-family and mixed-use buildings in the City Centre.
“Currently, most of the system’s heat is generated by natural gas-fired boilers, which enabled rapid and cost-effective development of the network,” Neuman noted in a corporate report. “The City is advancing low-carbon energy sources to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the use of sewer heat recovery.”
A new facility is proposed to connect to a Metro Vancouver sewer main and extract thermal energy from the sewage by way of an integrated heat exchanger and screening process. The facility is expected to supply more than 50 per cent of downtown’s yearly heating demand, Neuman added, “significantly reducing reliance on natural gas” and supporting “future opportunities” for cooling and heat recovery.
The project is expected to cost $89 million.
Councillor Doug Elford asked why SHARC’s bid was less than half that of the other bidder’s $12,148,509.97 quotation for the job.
“There is quite a difference in the bidding though,” Elford noted. “Can you explain that? It’s just massive, the difference. Are we going to get quality work out of this?”
Neuman replied that “in this scenario” there are limited vendors on the market and SHARC has been used on other projects and is locally sourced from the Metro Vancouver region, “whereas the other product was not local, so I can’t confirm exactly why the price is so significantly different but we are getting a local product as well as one that has been used on multiple projects in the region so we’re quite confident in it.”