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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 06 2017, @10:44PM (3 children)
I remember reading about a hospital doing this on a large scale, harvesting snow during winter and then drawing cold from it during summer saving was it a million dollars or something in cooling costs. I though it was very neat.
Of course, there's no snow available in some places, ever. :-/
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 06 2017, @11:07PM
Of course not. Redistribution of snow would be Socialist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 06 2017, @11:50PM
I believe that's why they're freezing the water themselves.
You do know that freezing water is something trivial to do in the 21st century, right?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07 2017, @12:52AM
A cheese factory near us (western New York state) runs a sprinkler during the winter and makes an ice mountain on top of a grid of heat exchanger pipes. Might be 20 feet (6 m) high? They save a lot of money all summer long using the cold to chill incoming milk.