Tampines to get cooling system by 2025

By the first half of 2025, Tampines will become the first town centre here to retrofit a centralised cooling system in a project that will slash the environmental cost of air-conditioning. It will also pave the way for more than 80 per cent of buildings in Singapore to follow suit.

Yesterday, owners of seven buildings agreed to start work on SP Group's first distributed district cooling network, with another slated to join in the future, said SP Group and investment company Temasek in a statement.

District cooling technology involves generating chilled water in a centralised location, and then sending the water through a network to multiple buildings. It is more energy efficient as the system reaps the benefits of economies of scale.

While air-conditioning was hailed by founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew as Singapore's secret to success in the tropics, its comfort comes at the price of up to half of a building's energy consumption.

The shared infrastructure from Tampines' future district cooling system is expected to help the town reduce carbon emissions by 1,359 tonnes annually, equivalent to removing 1,236 cars from the roads, said the statement.

The network will also achieve savings of more than 2,800,000 kilowatt hours annually - the power consumption per year of 905 three-room Housing Board households.

The buildings in the network are Century Square, CPF Tampines Building, Income at Tampines Junction, OCBC Tampines Centre 2, Our Tampines Hub, Tampines Mall and Tampines 1.

Because this system is being implemented on an existing site, chilled-water pipes will be retrofitted and installed in the buildings' own chiller plants.

Separately, Ascendas Reit affirmed its interest in subscribing to the cooling system for commercial building Telepark.

Building the novel network is expected to cost between $40 million and $60 million, said Mr S. Harsha, managing director of sustainable solutions at SP Group.

Out of 14 buildings considered for the pre-feasibility study, only eight have expressed intent to join it so far because some buildings with newer chillers did not find it commercially viable to integrate their systems, he said.

While Tampines' distributed district cooling network has not been tested in a smaller setting, chief engineer Foo Yang Kwang of SP Group subsidiary Singapore District Cooling is cautiously confident that the company, with its experience in building the world's largest underground district cooling system in Marina Bay, will be able to pull the feat off.

"We have done it before. This modification work is no different from normal chiller plants doing their own retrofitting," he said.

Building owners participating in the project are confident that it will help promote sustainability.

Said Mr Lim Khiang Tong, group chief operating officer of OCBC Bank: "Climate change and its effects have made sustainability a fundamental business driver and an agenda for collective action."

Minister for Social and Family Development Masagos Zulkifli, who witnessed the signing of the agreements, said that given a significant proportion of buildings today will still exist in 2050, the project is crucial in illustrating how sustainable solutions can be integrated to transform existing towns.

Mr Masagos, an MP for Tampines GRC, said: "The energy and cost savings, as well as reduction in carbon emissions enjoyed by building owners, prove that with the right solutions, doing good and doing well are not mutually exclusive and will address the challenge posed by climate change."