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California utility augments 1,800 air conditioning units with “ice battery”
A Santa Barbara-based company called Ice Energy has partnered with NRG Energy to deliver 1,800 “ice batteries” to commercial and industrial buildings served by electric utility Southern California Edison (SCE). The units are expected to reduce air conditioning bills by up to 40 percent and eliminate 200,000 tons of CO2 over the next 20 years.
Ice Energy has been building ice-based cooling systems since the early 2000s. Much like pumped storage or compressed air “batteries,” Ice Energy essentially stores electricity by drawing power from the grid at non-peak times to freeze water in a special container. Then at peak times, when the cost of electricity is high and grid operators are struggling to keep up with demand, Ice Energy’s systems kick in and use that block of ice to cool the space that the air conditioning unit normally serves.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Sunday May 07 2017, @08:57PM (2 children)
- The savings comes from displacing peak demand, and reducing the use of CO2 generating peaker plants that come online to help fill in generation demand during peak times when the normal grid generation plants can't keep up. Those other plants run 24/7 so their output is fairly stead, the peakers add additional output. Elimination of those would result in a net CO2 reduction.
- The peaker plants it is being deployed to address are not solar, they are fossil fuel systems. These are systems turned on during high peak times. Eliminating those most definitely reduces carbon output. That it uses sources available at night doesn't affect the overall CO2 output over a 24 hour period, as those plants will be operating 24/7 anyway. Taking the peaker plants offline is the goal here.
- The system does not have to be 100% efficient to be more efficient than running a multi-ton AC, it just has to be more efficient than the equivalent cooling time it replaces. Remember it's replacing AC for up to 3 hours, not running along side it. That means while the ice system is running, the AC compressors are not.
- You are making a statement not supported by TFA. Can you back up that it was not chosen for it's merits as an energy storage platform?
- This is due to the fact that those systems do not also have solar deployments at the site. Again, however, reducing peak demand means reducing the use of natural gas peaker plants, which produce CO2 in excess of the normal grid generation.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Sunday May 07 2017, @11:54PM (1 child)
> Remember it's replacing AC for up to 3 hours, not running along side it. That means while the ice system is running, the AC compressors are not.
Ice Energy's promotional video from 2011 shows it running alongside an existing air conditioner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g69Y9B3nZOI [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Monday May 08 2017, @05:00AM