Article: Sierra College improves campus life with thermal energy storage

August 4, 2015

At Sierra College, a community college located in Rocklin, California, thermal energy storage has been deployed to help control the college's operating costs. In addition to helping the school minimize its costs by storing energy in the form of ice, the IceBank® energy storage tanks installed by CALMAC help improve campus life at Sierra College in a couple ways.

Sierra College benefits from purchasing power after sunset
The most immediate advantage that Sierra College has gained after the installation of energy storage is the ability to cool the campus at a lower cost. Electricity consumed by the college at night when demand is low is significantly cheaper than running air conditioners during the hottest part of the day. Subsequently, the ice stored by CALMAC thermal energy storage tanks overnight can be used to cool the campus during the day for far less than the cost of simply running the facility's chillers during the day.

According to University Business, Sierra College's thermal energy storage solution has already had an impact on the campus. The 75kW of energy storage now help the community college save thousands each month on cooling costs.

IceBank® energy storage tanks double as a canvas and as a noise solution
The addition of thermal energy storage, as well as a bit of creative thinking, have helped the tanks to enhance the outdoor Campus Center by transforming it into a welcoming barbeque picnic area art students use the storage tanks as a palette for painting their artistic expressions including a portrait of Pablo Picasso.

Sierra College also found use for the IceBank® energy storage tanks as a means to reduce noise pollution on campus. By replacing the loud chillers with quiet thermal storage tanks, the Campus Center became a more appealing area for students to visit.

Comunity colleges can benefit from thermal storage
Sierra College is just one of a thousand schools taking advantage of thermal energy storage. The Chabot-Las Positas Community College District near San Francisco, for example, saves over $200,000 annually thanks to some help from thermal storage. Likewise, the Los Angeles Community College (LACCD) Sustainable Building program contains an energy strategy to reduce energy demand and store energy for later use.

Core technologies to meet the strategy include central plants to manage demand, thermal energy storage to manage peak energy loads, solar photovoltaic arrays, solar thermal systems, micro-turbine generators and centralized monitoring. At LACCD's Southwest College, nearly 2 MW of thermal energy storage helps supply 9,900 ton-hours of cooling capacity on a typical design day, reducing cooling costs by shifting a large portion of its cooling load to off-peak hours.