I'm going to move fairly quickly. We're going to focus mostly on the Southeast False Creek development, which is the home of the Olympic Village, to illustrate how we're doing integrated energy planning and deploying those systems. I'll talk a little bit about what we see as the benefits, and then I will give you just a taste of how it's not just a single project but is actually changing the way we do business throughout the entire city and how we look at planning and development in the city.
I'll start with Southeast False Creek. It is a compact mixed-use brownfield development that incorporates green buildings, a renewable district heating system, and sustainable and electric transportation planning and systems. I can't stress enough how important compact mixed use of land is. It enables public and active transportation, it facilitates the green buildings, and it really is a key piece in making the economics of district heating and renewable district energy systems work. It's a foundational piece that's quite important.
The Southeast False Creek Neighbourhood Energy Utility, which is the utility for our district heating system, is under construction. We're actually providing heat to the village as construction is completed. The energy centre itself will be done in a few months. It's almost up and running. I'll explain what it is.
Really, it's a heating utility in which heat is distributed through the entire neighbourhood, which at build-out will be home to 16,000 residents. We distribute that heat energy using hot water pipes buried in the ground, and that really is the key part here. I'll come back to that a bit later. That heat is transferred from the heat infrastructure for the neighbourhood to the buildings through heat exchangers, and then the heat is used for hot water or space heating in all the buildings.
Most of the heat is produced at a neighbourhood energy centre, and I want to talk a little bit more about that with an upcoming slide. Before I go on to green buildings, I'll just talk a little bit more about the district heat sources for that.
Again, as I said, the key element of a district system is actually the energy distribution infrastructure. There are many options for producing heat in a sustainable fashion, and there's no one answer that fits all. I really want to stress the idea of not getting fixated on a single technology, because there are many different opportunities, many different technologies that will work in different contexts.
In Southeast False Creek, we looked at quite a variety. We looked at ground-source heat, biomass heat, and sewer heat pumps. In the end we selected or opted to go with a sewer heat-pump system. In essence, we were rebuilding a sewer pump station adjacent to that neighbourhood anyway. We looked at that, and we said that if we extracted the heat from the sewer system using heat-pump technology, we could provide 70% of the heating requirements of that entire neighbourhood with that waste heat source. So that was the technology we selected. That's just to meet the base load, which is most of the load. When it gets really cold and we need a little bit of extra heat, we'll be using natural gas boilers for that peak and backup heat.
The other thing about this backbone of hot water is that it facilitates in-building solutions as well, so three of the buildings in Southeast False Creek will have solar hot water on the roof. When those solar hot water panels are producing more heat than is required in the building, then they can export it to this infrastructure, and the network of hot water piping can distribute it throughout the neighbourhood.
Coming back to the previous slide on green buildings, as the mayor of Guelph previously said, the first approach really is efficiency. In Southeast False Creek, that's where we started. All the buildings in that five million square foot development will be LEED gold or better, so they'll all be developed to LEED gold or better. The community centre will be LEED platinum there. Finally, we are developing a demonstration net zero energy building, and it will be a multi-family senior housing complex when it's completed.
Really, the purpose there is to help us move towards having all new construction carbon-neutral by 2030. Council has given staff a target to have all new development be carbon-neutral by 2030. To meet that objective we have to push the efficiency in building and renewable sources. Again, district energy is an enabling infrastructure piece for renewable energy.
The last piece of the Southeast False Creek example illustrates how we've done sustainable transportation. I've already said how the compact mixed use is so important to enable public transportation and walking and cycling. It's right close to the downtown core, which is the biggest employment centre in the province. The business as usual case of heating those buildings would have been electric baseboard heat. By implementing a district heating system, we've left the transmission capacity into the urban core and the generation capacity of that electricity available for other sources.
One of the applications that we see as very important to our low-carbon future is electrification of transportation, so the buildings in Southeast False Creek will all provide dedicated charge points for electric vehicles. There will also be electrification of public transportation. The new Canada Line, which will soon be open from the airport coming into the urban core, runs on electricity. The city thought it was important enough to fund the development of the station for those neighbourhoods to support the choices, but in addition, we view this as a great opportunity to reintroduce streetcars into Vancouver. During the Olympics, we'll be running a demonstration with the hope that we'll be able to extend that and maintain that demonstration past the Olympics and extend the line into the urban core.
So what do we see as the benefits of integrated energy systems? Really, we see that the buildings, the roads, and the energy infrastructure that we build today are going to be around for 50 to 100 years. These are long-term investments, and we think it only makes sense, if we're going to use public assets, to invest in the challenges of tomorrow and to look at the low-cost life cycle costs of development. Also, when we build things, we build them to address multiple challenges instead of just having one piece of infrastructure addressing one challenge.
So we see these things as important parts of meeting our greenhouse gas reduction targets. We think they're really important for the resiliency of our communities in terms of lowering their dependence on fossil fuels for transportation and heating and energy. We think that's really important. Having this hot water infrastructure and using heat pumps today means the system will be ready to easily accept whatever the technology becomes 15 years from now. We don't know what the technology of tomorrow will be, but the hot water allows for that. It's economically sustainable. This isn't a wild idea that we just pour money into because it looks good. It is funded through the utility charges to the customers, which will be cost-competitive with what they'd pay for electricity. Finally, I think it's really important in that it fosters economic development and an innovation economy.
There is one last piece I want to introduce. This is a specific example, but the ideas I'm talking about here we are applying on a city-wide basis. We have a green building strategy in which we're using our land use and our building code controls. Vancouver controls its own building code, which is very rare in Canada. We're using those controls to systematically improve the efficiency of our buildings, and we're looking towards starting to use that control to introduce requirements for renewable energy as we move forward. We're doing that on a city-wide basis, and we have the best energy requirements of any code in North America for our detached housing. Our prescriptive path is greater than EnerGuide 80 for all new single-family homes.
The other piece I want to talk about is district energy. Southeast False Creek is nice, but a lot of people say that's just one great big development that's happening very quickly. We started mapping the opportunities for district energy. That involves really looking at existing heat demand, the density of heat demand, as well as future demand of big new redevelopments that will be dense--and there'll be a lot of new demand.
We started looking at waste heat sources. We looked at our sewer heat pumps where we have existing district systems. On the final slide you'll start to see--and I just include it for illustration--that our whole downtown core right now is provided energy through a legacy steam system. Currently it has natural gas boilers, but because that heat production is centralized, it really creates an opportunity for us to work with them and introduce a more renewable heat source there. UBC also has natural gas fired boilers, and they're looking at changing their heat source. We have Southeast False Creek, which is nearing completion. It's right near the Broadway Corridor, which has a big heat load density. It's hydronic, which uses hot water in the buildings, so that should be connectable to a utility. We have the General Hospital just south of there with its steam system, and as you go further south, we have Children's and Women's Health Centre, and then way far in the south of the city we have East Fraserlands, which we've done the feasibility study for.
A renewable district system looks viable, and right now we're negotiating to import heat from a waste incinerator in the adjacent municipality of Burnaby and bring it to provide the heat for that site.
I want to close by stressing that Southeast False Creek is a great story, but it is not isolated. There are multiple opportunities in Vancouver and all urban communities to implement these strategies and approaches.
Thank you.