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Ben Preiss
Ice Cooling to Help Large Buildings Chill Out During Peak Hours
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A new system saves electricity and lowers electric demand at peak hours by freezing water in large tanks at night when power is cheaper and demand is low. During the day air is piped through the ice in the tanks, cooling the air then circulated through the building.
Ice storage can be used as the sole cooling system, or it can be combined with traditional systems to help ease the power demands during peak hours. At Credit Suisse, for example, the company must cool 1.9 million square feet of office space at the Met Life tower, a historic building that was New York's tallest in the days before the Empire State Building.
In the basement, three main cooling rooms house chilling machines and 64 tanks that hold 800 gallons of water each. Credit Suisse has a traditional air conditioning system, but engineers use the more efficient system first.
"The concept is the same, but when you make something mechanical, it can break, but a big block of ice four floors below grade level isn't going to do anything but melt," said Todd Coulard of Trane Energy Services. The company built the Credit Suisse system and is one of several that work with ice storage."I've been doing green since before it was cool," he said. "The idea of not only saving money for large companies, but doing something that benefits the environment is win-win. It's doing the right thing."
(news.yahoo)
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Via: news.yahoo
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