It's also interesting that it's also part of the city's drinking water supply:
> The Energy Transfer Station includes large arrays of heat exchangers that allow the heat from the downtown chilled water loop to be rejected into the city’s drinking water supply before distribution to the public. The heat removed from the downtown chilled water loop is therefore never transferred to Lake Ontario and the slight temperature increase is insignificant for water utility consumers.
I've read about this before when Toronto was implementing a system like this. The City of Toronto cools a large portion of it's downtown office towers using this method. They draw cold water from deep in Lake Ontario to be pumped into chillers to cool the office buildings. Seems to be environmentally friendly and cost efficient.
American air conditioners running at full power, chilling the interior and dripping on the sidewalk below on a hot day always deeply trouble me. Maybe it's my european view on things, but for contrast here in Munich we aren't just building out a city-wide heat network, but we also have a cold network! Cold river water flows through the pipe network that traverses the city and large office building can get connected to it. This way they can save massively on electricity for air conditioning by having the water do the cooling instead. And then once the water has traversed all pipes, it simply gets released back into its stream on the other end of town, just as clean as when it entered, and only slightly warmer.
I think the system just has an isolated loop that heat exchanges with the incoming municipal water supply. Unsure if the whole system cools the loop glycol further or not, but ultimately there’s still a compressor-based aircon system sitting somewhere, probably at each building, that they’re depending on. They’re just not rejecting heat to the air (as much?).
Would love to know if a data centre could get paid for rejecting it’s heat to the system during what is heating time for other users.
From their website I gleaned that they have 5 facilities, and several miles of piping that carries ice-cold water to their customers, large buildings around.
It's the maximally outsourced air-conditioning solution I ever saw :)
Sorta. They run heat exchangers between the in-bound municipal water and loops that go to the office buildings.
So it helps with some eco-effects (ie: there’s no dumping of the heated water), but everyone’s municipal water is a bit warmer in summer. I don’t think the effects of that have been calculated. Can offset water heating a bit; but other office towers use that water for their a/c cooling needs.
They deepened the water intake too, so it definitely means colder tap water in winter too, which residents mostly have to heat up inefficiently.
I know absolutely nothing of cooling and refrigeration, but it is an area I've been thinking of transitioning my career towards (burned out SysAdmin) and learning as a trade.
What you just described is something I actually overheard a couple of guys talking about at a neighborhood pub. A/C and Energy efficiency are bit topics in Central Texas as other posts mentioned.
Do you have any articles you'd recommend for someone with a passive interest in renewables that may cover residential projects like this?
Several data centres in Toronto (including the massive facilities at 151 Front Street West where most of the internet for the province passes through) make use of the deep lake cooling loop that takes water pumped in from Lake Ontario to cool equipment before moving on to other uses. Water is pumped in from a sufficient depth such that the temperature is fairly constant year round.
Another thing you can do is to simply use the slightly warmer water like you would use cold water. Half of downtown Toronto's office towers (including 151 Front) are cooled with water from Lake Ontario that then enters the city's water supply.
[Cloud and Heat](https://www.cloudandheat.com/hardware/) offers liquid cooling systems that purport to offer waste hot water on the town/small city scale.
What exactly are you thinking? We have a closed loop system on our process cooling water but it is cooled via heat exchangers that use chilled water (in the 40-50 degree range). That water is chilled with extremely large chillers that use condenser water that is run through the cooling towers. It's as much of a closed system as you can get...eventually you need to remove heat and you can't just add energy to get it.
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