The River District is located on former industrial lands along the Fraser River in southeast Vancouver. The development is being built to high social and environmental standards and will ultimately encompass over 880,000 m2 of new floor space, consisting mostly of residential uses, with some smaller amounts of retail, office, and community uses. The project is being led and developed by Wesgroup Properties.
River District Energy (RDE), a district energy utility owned and developed by Wesgroup, provides space heating and domestic hot water to most buildings in the River District. The system began operations using temporary gas-fired boilers and transitioned to a permanent boiler plant in late 2025.
RDE will be able to greatly reduce its fossil fuel consumption and GHG emissions through an innovative partnership with Metro Vancouver. Metro Vancouver is constructing a 5 km pipeline to bring waste heat from Metro’s existing waste-to-energy facility in Burnaby to RDE’s energy centre. This will allow nearly all of RDE’s heating needs to be met with waste heat, reducing both GHG emissions and electricity consumption. The project aligns well with the provincial government’s green energy objectives under the 2007 BC Energy Plan and the Clean Energy Act and has received an incentive from BC Hydro.
Reshape has supported RDE for many years in a variety of roles. Our work has included:
- Supporting the evaluation of low-carbon energy sources for RDE
- Assisting with rate applications to the BC Utilities Commission
- Provided ongoing support for the implementation of the district energy utility
