Temasek, SP Group to install sustainable cooling solutions in Tampines

The district cooling network will be installed in the first batch of seven buildings.

Tampines town centre will be retrofitted with an interconnected and sustainable cooling solution designed by SP Group which will be installed in seven buildings and will lower carbon emissions and save energy.

In a statement, Temasek and SP Group said Tampines will be Singapore’s first town centre that will be installed with the distributed district cooling (DDC) network, which is designed for brownfield developments and will be completed in the first half of 2025.

The seven buildings in Tampines Central that will be installed with the DDC network are Century Square, CPF Tampines Building, Income At Tampines Junction, OCBC Tampines Centre 2, Our Tampines Hub, Tampines Mall, and Tampines One. 

The brownfield cooling network will reduce Tampine’s carbon emissions by 1,359 tonnes annually, equivalent to removing 1,236 cars off the road. It will also achieve energy savings of over 2.8 million kilowatt-hour yearly, which can provide power to over 905 three-room HDB households for a year.

Masagos Zulkifli, Adviser to Tampines GROs, Minister for Social and Family Development, Second Minister for Health, and Minister-in-charge of Muslim Affairs, said that the project is crucial to Singapore as a proportion of its building stock will continue to exist in 2050. This will help prove the Lion City's commitment to adapt to and mitigate climate change. 

“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 our challenge posed by climate change,” he said.

Temasek and SP Group said the DDC will use existing in-building chiller plants instead of constructing a new centralised cooling plant, with a few injection nodes selected based on their existing excess cooling capacity and superior energy efficiency factor.

The injection nodes will be connected through a piping network wherein the rest of the buildings can obtain chilled water for their cooling needs, veering away from the need of having their own chiller plants. Century Square, Our Tampines Hub, and Tampines One will serve as the injection nodes for the seven buildings.

Cooling needs contribute to Singapore's annual carbon emissions as air-conditioners can use up to 50% of a building’s energy consumption. The introduction of the brownfield DDC in Tampines supports the Singapore Green Plan 2030, as over 80% of the country’s landscape is brownfield.

Temasek and SP Group also added that the DDC network will provide building owners with a combined life-cycle economic benefit of up to $50.8m over 30 years, and will also reduce unused cooling capacity by up to 42%, which will free up chiller plant areas that can be used by commercial and lifestyle spaces.