Lake Ontario pipe project nearing completion

Approximately sixteen thousand metres of HDPE pipe have been pieced together and installed for the Deep Water Lake Cooling system that will cool buildings in downtown Toronto using cold energy extracted from water deep in Lake Ontario. Three intake pipes were submerged last summer, and the cooling system is expected to begin operations this summer.
KWH Pipe Canada Ltd. (Huntsville, ON) supplied the 16,000 m of 1.6 m diameter pipe, and was responsible for manufacturing the pipe sections in Huntsville. From there they were trucked to Belleville, ON, where they were heat welded together into 1500 metre lengths, floated in the Bay of Quinte and towed on Lake Ontario to Toronto for final assembly.
The cooling project is an initiative of Enwave, a Toronto-area district energy company, which already offers district cooling to parts of downtown Toronto from a central chilled water plant. To establish this new cooling water supply, each of three new intake pipes extend 5 km into Lake Ontario from a filtration plant on Toronto Island. The pipe follows the natural slope of the lake to intake structures that rest on the lakebed at a depth of 83 m.