Surrey council OKs $5.8M contract for heat downtown<\/p>\n
Published 11:45 pm Monday, May 11, 2026<\/p>\n
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\u2019s new facility.<\/p>\n
Approved Monday, the spending limit is set at $6,075,000. Scott Neuman, Surrey\u2019s general manager of engineering, said the units are expected to be supplied within 32 weeks and installed by Fall 2028.<\/p>\n
Surrey\u2019s District Energy Utility so far provides heat and hot water to 49 multi-family and mixed-use buildings in the City Centre.<\/p>\n
\u201cCurrently, most of the system\u2019s heat is generated by natural gas-fired boilers, which enabled rapid and cost-effective development of the network,\u201d Neuman noted in a corporate <\/a>report<\/a>. \u201cThe City is advancing low-carbon energy sources to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the use of sewer heat recovery.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s yearly heating demand, Neuman added, \u201csignificantly reducing reliance on natural gas\u201d and supporting \u201cfuture opportunities\u201d for cooling and heat recovery.<\/p>\n The project is expected to cost $89 million.<\/p>\n Councillor Doug Elford asked why SHARC\u2019s bid was less than half that of the other bidder\u2019s $12,148,509.97 quotation for the job.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is quite a difference in the bidding though,\u201d Elford noted. \u201cCan you explain that? It\u2019s just massive, the difference. Are we going to get quality work out of this?\u201d<\/p>\n Neuman replied that \u201cin this scenario\u201d there are limited vendors on the market and SHARC has been used on other projects and is locally sourced from the Metro Vancouver region, \u201cwhereas the other product was not local, so I can\u2019t 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\u2019re quite confident in it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Surrey council OKs $5.8M contract for heat downtown Published 11:45 pm Monday, May 11, 2026 Surrey council awarded…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":664069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194299],"tags":[49,48,163792,87674],"class_list":["post-664159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-surrey","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-lower-mainland","tag-surrey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/664069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}