Initially, when they were looking into this, they had visited Amsterdam and a plant in France, which run on low-temperature hot water. Low-temperature hot water has to be below the boiling point—so, below 212°F or 100°C. That works there, because their climate is relatively stable at an average temperature of over 8°C or so, but here it wouldn't really work that well.
I'll use one hot water system as an example. Confederation Heights is running at 375°F right now. It's a high-temperature installation. We know that global warming is happening. I don't know if anyone is a non-believer, but I'm a believer, with all the weather events we're experiencing, especially the tornado that just ripped through and took out our substation at Merivale.
When you produce steam, you need only a small electrical pump to pump water into the boiler. The natural gas does the work: It pressurizes the boiler, and the steam flows from a high pressure to a low pressure. There are no pumps required. When we lost that substation, we were able to keep the steam plant going with a relatively small diesel generator, and we could do it infinitely, as long as we had diesel.
If you go to a hot-water system to try to supply the whole downtown core—and they're even talking about supplying Tunney's Pasture, Portage, and Terrasses de la Chaudière—you're going to need a system that would be huge, electrically. You would need pumps.
Right now, our chill system has over one million gallons in it. If they were to implement this heating system, it would have at least two million gallons of treated molybdate hot water. There will be chemicals in this hot-water system.
Whenever you do a plant shutdown and you're actually physically going to shut down the system and work on it, weld on it or cut on it, you have to drain it. You could literally have hundreds of thousands of gallons that will have to be drained from that system, and there's nowhere to put it. It has to go in the river, and that molybdate is going in there.
Steam is self-draining, and you don't need pumps to pump it. It goes from one area to another. It is designed for our climate.
Initially, when they said low-temperature, we said it couldn't be done. I heard last week that they've increased the temperature to 150°C. We're getting closer to where it may happen and could work, but it still doesn't stop some of the major issues with hot water when you're right beside a river system. The fish are going to drink it; we're going to drink it, and that's just not a great idea.