SINGAPORE: Tampines has become the first town centre in Singapore to be retrofitted with a distributed district cooling network, a sustainable cooling solution designed to enhance energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions.
Developed by SP Group, the cooling network connects seven existing buildings in Tampines town centre: Century Square, CPF Tampines Building, Income At Tampines Junction, OCBC Tampines Centre 2, Our Tampines Hub, Tampines Mall and Tampines 1.
The network is expected to cut Tampines’ carbon emissions by 1,000 tonnes annually – equivalent to removing 910 cars from the roads – and achieve energy savings of more than 2,300,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) a year, enough to power 710 three-room HDB flats a year.
Speaking at the launch event at Our Tampines Hub on Friday (Mar 14), Minister for Social and Family Development and Tampines GRC MP Masagos Zulkifli described the project as a “revolution in urban sustainability”.
“With climate change worsening, there is an urgent need to bolster our national sustainability efforts to address inevitable environmental challenges in the coming years. This distributed district cooling project will therefore provide a crucial foundation for Singapore to deploy more sustainable energy solutions in existing townships,” Mr Masagos said.
The cooling network is a key milestone in the Tampines eco-town master plan, which is focused on transforming Tampines into a more eco-friendly town, he added.
The launch was also attended by four other advisers to Tampines GRC grassroots organisations: MPs Koh Poh Koon, Desmond Choo and Baey Yam Keng, as well as People’s Action Party (PAP) new face, academic Charlene Chen.
HOW DISTRIBUTED DISTRICT COOLING WORKS
Unlike conventional cooling systems where individual buildings operate their own chillers, a distributed district cooling network centralises cooling by using injection nodes – buildings with excess cooling capacity and superior energy efficiency – to distribute chilled water through a closed-loop pipe network.
In this system, Century Square, Our Tampines Hub and Tampines 1 serve as injection nodes, supplying chilled water to the other connected buildings and eliminating the need for separate chiller plants.
By optimising installed cooling capacity and ensuring maximum efficiency, the network reduces equipment costs and frees up space for commercial use.
The network is engineered for brownfield developments to provide the same cooling comfort while improving energy efficiency and lowering carbon emissions. It is the world’s first large-scale brownfield distributed district cooling system retrofitted across existing multiple buildings in a densely built urban area, Mr Masagos said.
For the next phase, SP Group is working to add more buildings in Tampines to the network.
With more than 80 per cent of Singapore’s landscape comprising brownfield developments, such initiatives align with the Singapore Green Plan 2030 and the nation’s target of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, it said.
New pathways to support the nation’s climate goals and drive long-term resilience can be unlocked by reimagining how cooling solutions are deployed in existing urban environments, said SP Group CEO Stanley Huang.
