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Victoria Commons is a home community located between Kitchener and Waterloo and is one of Canada’s most advanced green energy systems providing sustainable, economical heating, cooling and electricity for its residents.
With a geo-exchange system, Victoria Commons heating and cooling is provided with no burning of natural gas or oil while the co-generation system also produces its own electricity. This can be used when the city’s electricity is more expensive, rather than generating their own power while exhaust heat is recovered and reused in the heating and cooling.
The geo-exchange system and its co-generation production provides 100% of the community’s heating and cooling and is almost emission-free with no boilers, chillers or cooling towers.

In 2008, IKEA Milano became the largest private geothermal installation in Europe. Groundheat provided IKEA with a turnkey operation. The project consisted of 300 vertical wells and over 60 kilometres of high-density polyethylene pipe producing 1.4 megawatts of output. The wells penetrate the ground to a depth of 87 to 125 metres, taking 30 kilometers of drilling over a 10,000 square metre area. Because the geothermal system used here is underground, it does not affect the surrounding landscape.
The system supplies 1,600 kilowatts of thermal power and 1,400 kilowatts of refrigerating power. This means savings of 300 tons of petroleum per year and 800 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Groundheat has recently completed the largest residential geothermal district energy project in the world in Rome, a design-build project managed entirely by Groundheat Energy with a 10,000 square feet mechanical room. It is a residential complex using 22 mid-rise buildings, interconnected for 1,000 apartments, the largest of its kind. It has a central heating and cooling system, which uses geothermal, co-generation and some solar energy. This project was executed for Italian developer Pietro Mezzaroma e Figli.

In 2009, Groundheat was involved in the construction of the first geothermal Walmart located in Burlington, Ontario. The store demonstrates geothermal heating and cooling technology in a large-scale Canadian retail operation.
The geothermal system on this location involves a 200-ton horizontal loop arrangement buried 7 feet below the store’s parking lot with 15 kilometers of piping filled with glycol, a heat transfer fluid. In the Summer, the pipes draw heat from the store and disperse it into the ground. In winter, the heat stored in the earth is pumped back into the store. Generally, this geothermal technology is sufficient to maintain a comfortable temperature within the structure.
The Burlington Walmart is expected to use an estimated 60% less energy than a typical Walmart store and reduce carbon emissions by about 141 tons.

Located in Markham, Ontario and set to begin construction this year, The Remington Centre will build and install one of the country’s largest geothermal systems - 1,100 tonnes of geothermal capacity to provide 100% of the energy required to heat and cool the entire facility.
Some notable features and principles of the sprawling 800,000-sf space include:

A hybrid approach including a geoexhange system with high-efficiency peaking boilers and fluid coolers

284 boreholes on a grid of 15-20 feet, utilizing over 80 km of underground tubing

Roof designed to encourage natural light while also help shade direct sunlight to reduce load on air conditioning

The skating rink doubles as waste heat recovery and will be used for snow melting at the entrance of the centre as well as heating the building

A roof which will reflect up to 90% of sunlight

Reductions include a 40% lowering of energy consumption and 25% decline in cost. The geothermal design will reduce roughly 2,500 tonnes of CO2 emission annually—the equivalent to removing 500 cars from the road and saving 900 hectares of rainforest per year.