VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA — On May 15, Vancouver’s mayor, Gregor Robertson, hosted a celebration at the former 2010 Winter Olympics village in Southeast False Creek, a section of the city’s formerly industrial waterfront, to mark the handing over of a first batch of the apartments to their new long-term residents.

To heat the high-rise buildings, their new inhabitants need only pull the plug in the bathtub or the kitchen sink and send their warm wastewater spiraling down the drain.

The Southeast False Creek Neighborhood Energy Utility, or N.E.U., supplies space heating and domestic hot water to local buildings using heat recovered from wastewater and raw sewage. “This is a test case for Vancouver,” said Chris Baber, the N.E.U.’s manager. It is also the first “district” energy system in North America to draw heat from untreated wastewater. There are only three similar projects worldwide: two in Oslo and one in Tokyo.

The central plant, which initially served the 2,800 athletes and officials housed in the Olympic Village, is already supplying heat to several buildings beyond the site. Ultimately, it will meet the energy requirements of 100 acres of waterfront real estate in central Vancouver, projected to have at least 16,000 residents by 2020.

Buildings constructed for the Games have been converted since February into more than 1,000 private and public housing units. “It’s going to become a neighborhood like any other, just a lot greener than most,” said Kieran McConnell, an N.E.U. systems engineer. The mixed-use residential community was recently awarded platinum certification — the highest level — under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or Leed, green-building rating system.

For the Olympics, almost 70 percent of the village’s heating came from waste heat recovery, topped up mainly by traditional natural gas boilers during exceptionally cold spells.

The process extracts heat from previously strained sewage, which is typically at 18 to 20 degrees Celsius (64 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit), using an industrial heat pump, a refrigeration unit which draws thermal energy from the waste and feeds it into a hot water distribution network. A high-efficiency, insulated piping system, buried underground, distributes the water at 65 degrees Celsius to neighboring buildings. After circulating through the buildings the water returns to the energy center, some 15 degrees Celsius cooler, to be heated again.

Relative to conventional combined electricity and natural gas systems, the sewage heat recovery process has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 65 percent, an immense source of pride for a city attempting to become a world leader in green energy. Of the N.E.U.’s construction cost, 30 million Canadian dollars, or $29 million, Canada’s federal government contributed 9.45 million dollars and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities invested 5 million dollars. The city of Vancouver paid the rest.

Consumers pay a flat fee and a variable energy charge based on metered usage. The charges are expected to rise more slowly than those of other utilities in British Columbia, Mr. Baber said, and they should be less sensitive to volatile energy markets. “Natural gas prices are all over the place,” he said. “Our customers aren’t expected to experience that kind of rate shock.”

Individual buildings, moreover, can pump excess heat that they do not use back into the system to earn a credit on their utility bills.

The N.E.U. plant is at the south end of the Cambie Street Bridge, a landmark. Initially, neighborhood residents balked at the prospect of having the facility’s boiler stacks across the street from their homes. The area, Mr. Baber said, had an industrial past, and “when they learned the plant was coming, a lot of people thought it was a real regressive step.”

So Pechet & Robb, a Vancouver design studio, and a local architect, Walter Francl, were commissioned to design something more attractive than a drab utility building. They conceived a structure with five stacks of staggered heights, resembling the long, slender fingers of a stainless steel hand. At the top of each stack a “fingernail” LED panel changes color to display the amount of green energy being produced.

 “One of our intentions was to relay to residents how much energy they’re using, the idea being that if they’re aware of what they consume, they’ll be more inclined to turn down their thermostats or stop the water from running,” said Mr. McConnell, the N.E.U. engineer.

The facility was also designed with an educational component in mind. The walls of the boiler room are built of glass so that passers by can peer inside. And portholes make it possible to see the sewage pumping station at work underground. Onlookers can even take a guided cellphone tour of the building: call the designated number and information about the system is provided as you wander around outside.

Although district energy is relatively new to North America, Europe has been building high-efficiency, low-temperature community energy systems for hundreds of years. “We’ve always had extremely cheap electricity and natural gas in North America and there hasn’t been the same sort of need for conservation here,” Mr. McConnell said. “But things are starting to change. It’s very likely now that we’ve broken ground that this is going to be replicated many times over.”

Hong Nhung source: nytimes