The $63-million WFCU Place captures waste heat from its CO₂ ice plant and reuses it to heat spaces and produce hot water.
Making ice is usually an energy-intensive part of running an arena.
At North Bay's WFCU Place, some of the heat produced in that process is captured and reused throughout the building.
The new twin-pad arena and community centre's carbon dioxide-based ice plant sends waste heat through an energy loop running throughout the facility. The recovered heat is used to heat spaces throughout the building and produce hot water.
It's one of several systems designed to help the $63-million facility meet the Canada Green Building Council's Zero Carbon Building – Design Standard V3.
David Jackowski, the city's project manager for special projects, operations and infrastructure, said the CO₂ system was chosen partly because of the heat it produces.
“Basically what that means in engineering speak is we can use that energy in other parts of the building,” Jackowski explained to BayToday during the recent grand opening of the facility.
See: 'We finally made it’: North Bay opens $63M twin-pad arena and community centre
In a traditional arena, much of that heat would simply be lost, Jackowski said.
“Typically in an arena you'll see steam coming out the top," he said. "That's typically where the energy goes.”
A diagram of WFCU Place's “Energy Loop” shows how waste heat from the CO₂ ice plant is captured and circulated through the facility for space heating and hot water. The system can also store excess heat in the concrete beneath the spectator areas and walking track. William Konken/BayToday
At WFCU Place, that heat is instead fed back into the building.
Some of it can also be stored in the concrete beneath the spectator seating and walking track.
The concrete has in-floor heating, allowing the building to store excess heat and use it later when another area needs it.
The system can even move heat from one occupied space to another.
“If we have a lot of body heat coming in the community room, 500 people, it gets very hot,” Jackowski said.
“We can harvest that energy as well, store it in the concrete for use later, or we can use it directly to heat spaces.”
When recovered heat isn't enough, cold-climate air-source heat pumps provide additional heat. Electric boilers are available as a backup during extreme cold.
Using less energy to make the ice
The arena also uses a different approach to making the ice itself.
Traditional systems use heated water when flooding the ice. WFCU Place uses a cold-water ice-making system instead.
The facility uses a vortex system to remove gas from the water without heating it first.
That means the water going onto the ice is about 70 F, compared with roughly 140 F under the traditional process.
“Not as much energy went in, not as much energy needs to come out,” Jackowski said.
He said the ice plant and cold-water system, along with a 28 per cent reduction in energy use compared with a conventional facility, helped the building meet the zero-carbon design standard.
The building was also designed to accommodate future energy projects.
Its roof is sloped to the south, and its electrical rooms are ready for solar panels. Jackowski said solar could eventually reduce the facility's grid load by 66 per cent.
The building also has space for battery storage, which could allow it to rely less on the electrical grid during periods of high demand.
Those systems are not operating yet.
The cold-water technology is also relatively new, Jackowski said, as arenas have traditionally relied on hot-water flooding to make ice.
“We've been hearing about it for about five to seven years, but it's been slow adoption,” he said.
“It is reducing energy, so we do expect this technology to eventually take over hot-water flooding.”
