Environmental Tech II: “Take a look at the innovations designed to hold off a global warming meltdown.”


Original air date: November 12, 2007
Excerpts from the broadcast:

Chilling out in this heat pushes the city power grid to the max, threatening blackouts, and prompting calls to build new power plants. But city officials have found ways to relieve the pressure, like using energy at night to cool their library during the day.

Sound tricky, well it’s all in the ice, the Ice Bear cooling system.

Inside those coils is where the Ice Bear performs its first trick. At night, a pump sends cool refrigerant through the coils in the water. The water freezes into a block around the coils.

During the day when the air conditioning unit is turned on, the pump sends warm refrigerant back through the coils, and through the ice. That refrigerant is chilled, and then pumped through pipes into the existing air conditioning system to provide cooling.

At the end of the day the Ice Bear goes into hibernation until later that night when the process begins again.

By getting its energy at night instead of mauling the power grid during the day, the Ice Bear can put the deep freeze on greenhouse gases, by using cheaper, cleaner nighttime energy.

“A lot of places are now generating renewable energy at night with wind, so by moving some of that demand to the nighttime, you are also moving some of that demand to cleaner sources of energy that help the environment.” Terry Tamminen, Cullman Sr. Fellow, New America Foundation

The technology is so simple.