COOL IDEA: Ice energy will freeze water at night when temperatures are cooler, and then thaw it during the day when power demand is highest.
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LOS ANGELES -- Ice Energy has a novel solution for the electricity challenges of the 21st century: Make Popsicles.
Put another way, the company wants to freeze water at night in refrigerator-like boxes adjacent to commercial air conditioners and then thaw it during the day, when power demand is highest. This would theoretically allow AC-hungry commercial buildings in warm climates to cut energy use during heat waves, by shutting air conditioners down while still providing cool air to buildings from melting ice.
After seven years of development and testing, the Windsor, Colo.-based company signed an agreement recently with the Southern California Public Power Authority here to deploy some 6,000 Popsicle-making units at 1,500 locations in the utility's service territory around Los Angeles. Ice Energy says the units, called Ice Bears, will lead to a 30 percent fuel reduction for the utility through avoided use of so-called peaker generation plants, which are only turned on when demand is highest.
In Southern California and other warm places, the benefits are numerous, the company says, because of a heavy reliance on air conditioners during hotter months. Avoiding peak power also means importing less coal-fired electricity from out of state when the California grid is taxed during heat waves.
"Electricity suffers from the central tenet that it has to be used when it is generated," Ice Energy CEO Frank Ramirez said in an interview. "What we're really leveraging is what nature gives us every single day through its rotation: cooler temperatures at night."
Ramirez likes to call their technology "energy storage," but in truth the Ice Bear is just a way to use energy when it is cheaper and more plentiful. Doing so could save utilities money, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create more blue-collar jobs for HVAC technicians and manufacturers.
The cost? The Southern California Public Power Authority paid about $100 million for the 6,000 units, a price that comes with a maintenance guarantee by Ice Energy, which plans to subcontract to HVAC experts, and smart-grid coordination with the distribution network.
That may seem pricey on its surface, but Ramirez insists the investment will save the utility as much as 20 percent in reduced fuel costs over a 20-year period. And, as he likes to point out, that is an investment not backed by the federal or state government, unlike many rival new technologies that tend to vie for subsidies.
"We are the first stand-alone energy efficiency technology that doesn't require government assistance or subsidy to employ," Ramirez said.
Not your average icemaker
This is how the Ice Bear works: It fluctuates between charging and cooling, freezing 450 gallons of water at night (a process that might be said to "store" electricity) to then reverse course during the day. The cool air is fed into buildings with the same duct system already in place.
Some have likened the technology to hybrid cars, which rely on batteries to shut down internal combustion engines until their juice runs out, when the engine restarts. Also comparable are geothermal heat pumps that are used widely in Scandinavia and other cold nations to heat homes during colder months. Like the Ice Bear, such systems act like freezers, in a sense, with the back of the pump (which gives off heat) built into the inside of a home, with water freezing taking place outside.
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8 Comments
Add CommentJust one of SCPPA's many power stations can produce 4,000 megawatts.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut these 6000 heat storage units all together could sustain (assuming they were perfectly efficient) less than 79 megawatts over half a day.
6000
* 450 gallons
* 3.7854 liters per gallon
* 999.84 grams per liter
* 333.55 joules per gram
/ 3600000000 joules per megawatt hour
/ 12 hours
= 78.901 megawatts
Someone please tell me that my math is wrong.
BillSmith:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIts not the 79 megawatts that's important its the reduction in peak power demand.
Most energy is generated by large coal fired power plants. Problem with coal fired power plants: no matter what the energy output, they still consume almost the same amount of coal, to use some of this surplus energy when there is no demand, users get off peak discounts. Now you know why.
Power stations are built to cope with peak demand. This system increases demand when there is none and reduces demand at peak times by cooling buildings with melting ice.
Lets hope they recycle the water too and use additives to increase the thermal capacity of water when heating from zero centigrade to 20 centigrade. I don't know if they can improve the latent heat of melting.
You have a point about the peak power not being a whole 12 hours.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've gone back to look for a comparable system currently in operation. The Credit Suisse building in New York claims to have reduced their peak power by 900 kilowatts (17.578 watts/gallon).
Similar results from this proposed system would shave 47 megawatts off SCPPA's peak power. To be fair, this is a warmer climate, so maybe double the savings to 95 megawatts.
Compared to the 4000 megawatt peak capacity of just one power plant, this still looks like a pretty slim improvment to me. But 95MW is comparable to the capacities of SCPPA's wind turbine projects, and I suppose every little bit helps.
Perhaps a better way to tackle this would be to use solar thermal panels to power absorption cycle air conditioning. That way you get the maximum cooling when the temperature is highest.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.solarpanelsplus.com/solar-air-conditioning/
Note: I have no commercial interest in the above organisation!
Did they ever think about bringing back the old Swamp Cooler? When I went to college there, I lived in Handford and my apartment had a Swamp Cooler that kept to whole apartment cool when the temp outside was over a hundred.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat the Swamp Cooler consisted of was, a rust proof box, a thick straw filter, and a fan. A certain amount of water soaked the straw at a given time, the fan pulled outside air through the soaked straw and pumped the cooled air into the apartment. The temp inside stayed around seventy degrees and my power bill was very low; and if you purify the water, you do not have to worry about bacteria build up.
This makes a lot of sense. However, is not exactly a new idea. At my company we installed a similar system over 15 years ago.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJamesDavis thats to simple... swamp coolers are all over Florida but no one thinks about em in the rest of the country
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe have Swamp Coolers here in the California Desert (Palm Springs). Although they do not work very well when the humidity gets high (so I do not understand their popularity in Florida.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact, during the summer, the weather cast always include the dew point, and a statement of whether swamp coolers can work.