How thermal storage beats traditional cooling
With thermal storage, businesses can lower cooling costs dramatically and reduce environmental impact. There are also at least four built-in advantages over traditional air-conditioning: flexible control, stored emergency cooling or redundancy, resiliency and future proofing for smart grid preparedness.
1. FLEXIBLE CONTROL OF WHEN ENERGY IS DELIVERED AND USED.
With flexible control you can decide to use energy when it is most cost effective.
Thermal storage offers six modes of operation for various times of the day or year. During on-peak daytime hours, occupants and buildings may be kept cool and comfortable by the cooling stored within the CALMAC IceBank tanks. Occupants can be cooled exclusively by ice, exclusively by the chiller or by the chiller and the ice depending on your electrical rates, demand charges, demand response events, etc. During night-time off-peak hours chillers can charge and store ice inside the energy storage tanks. During spring and fall when temperatures are milder, and cooling demands are lower, the ice can exclusively cool the facility.
1. Cooling with the chiller only.
2. Cooling with ice storage only.
3. Cooling with chiller and ice.
4. Charge and store ice with cheap night time energy for daytime use.
5. Charge IceBank® tanks and cool.
6. Off.
2. ADD REDUNDANCY. PLAN AHEAD WITH EMERGENCY COOLING.
With energy storage, you always have extra cooling on stand by. During chiller maintenance, or for a quick, several hour cool down for your building, ice storage is available to meet the need.
3. MAKE YOUR BUILDING RESILIENT.
In a power outage, people in your building can keep cool, productive and comfortable. A back up generator can run controls, pumps and fans while staff evaluates the situation. With stored cooling, there’s no need to oversize your backup generator to run chillers—you can get by without.
4. BE PREPARED FOR THE SMART GRID.
If you’re running IceBank energy storage, you’re ready for demand response programs which can bring you revenue. Software designed to forecast power prices can communicate to the grid operator that your building is dropping its cooling load. Now the grid doesn’t need to go to a power plant. Your HVAC system can easily change the mode of your HVAC operations and essentially become a virtual power plant in the eyes of the utility. When you shift to cooling with ice storage only or cooling with chiller and ice you will get paid for helping free up more power on the grid.
