Enwave

Investing to expand low-carbon district energy

Toronto-based Enwave provides scalable, low-carbon district energy services in five Canadian cities. By harnessing local energy sources to provide either heating or cooling to multiple customers from a central plant, Enwave’s district energy systems help improve energy efficiency.

Infrastructure

Asset Class

District Energy

Sector

2021

Year invested

The company

Enwave provides district energy services in five Canadian cities. By harnessing a local energy source to provide heating and/or cooling to several customers from a central plant, its scalable low-carbon energy solutions offer a number of benefits. They include energy efficiency, stability of supply and more predictable costs. Enwave’s Deep Lake Water Cooling System in Toronto is the largest of its kind, harnessing the very cold waters at the bottom of Lake Ontario to cool more than 100 commercial, public and residential buildings. Enwave’s other projects include a geothermal energy system serving hundreds of homes in Markham, Ont., a project that converts municipal waste to energy in Charlottetown, PEI, and a massive thermal energy storage facility in Toronto that will be the first of its kind in Canada.

The opportunity

Investing in Enwave in 2021 gave us the opportunity to own a world-class infrastructure project in our home base of Canada. We were attracted to its long-term contracts with customers, which help us generate steady returns for our members. And with cities consuming over 75% of the world’s energy, expanding low-carbon district energy will help building operators and cities advance their decarbonization goals. Since it aggregates energy demand across multiple buildings, and leverages technologies that wouldn’t be accessible to just one building, the most significant benefit of district energy is scale. By eliminating the need for heating and cooling systems in individual buildings, Enwave’s solutions boost energy efficiency and enable customers to regain square footage, positively impacting their bottom line.

The results

Enwave has become a valued partner to building operators and cities as they seek to decarbonize.
In Toronto, it provides heating and cooling to about 150 buildings, and its customer base is growing.
Its Deep Lake Water Cooling system alone displaces 55 megawatts annually from the city’s electricity grid.

Well, there's a tremendous alignment on values when you think about energy and you think about the energy transition as being a long term and big, big goal for society. Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has shown us and demonstrated to us that patient capital and big aspirations is what they're looking for. And that's a huge alignment for what we need to be able to service our stakeholders out here in Toronto and all the cities that we serve.

Carlyle Coutinho

CEO, Enwave