This NYC Skyscraper is Being Cooled by Ice

How do you beat the summer heat? If you are like most people, you turn the air conditioning on when it is the hottest time of the day. But what if you could use nonpeak electrical hours and store the cold to use the next day? This idea has become a reality for a New York City skyscraper that is being cooled by ice.

Eleven Madison, an iconic skyscraper in the heart of Manhattan is using cool, frozen overnight to cool the building, reported CBS News. Four stories below ground, an ice battery system freezes water during the night, when electrical use is low, and uses this ice to cool the building during the day.

“There’s about 500,000 pounds of ice created every night,” Holly Paeper, president of Trane Technologies Commercial HVAC Americas business (the company that did the installation in the NYC skyscraper) told CBS. “And to put that into context, think about three city buses full of ice cubes.”

Ice Batteries

The ice batteries can save a lot of energy costs, but they can also take pressure off the electrical grid. Air conditioning uses nearly 20 percent of energy use in homes and businesses globally. However, on extremely hot days that number can jump to 70 percent. That much usage at the same time puts stress on the electrical grid and could lead to blackouts.

Installations like the one in Eleven Madison that uses nonpeak hours to freeze the ice help to alleviate that. But according to Paeper, the company has only installed the technology in about 4,000 sites around the world and there are 6 million commercial buildings in the US and only a fraction of them are using this innovative solution.

So how does it work? The system in the basement of Eleven Madison uses 100 tanks that are each the size of a parking spot. That’s a lot of space being used but smaller building requires fewer tanks. Plus there is a lot of energy consumed in freezing water so a more efficient way had to be found.

“We take water, we add some other elements and molecules to it,” Dr. Patrick Shamberger, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at Texas A&M explained. “And based on the composition, we can control that temperature basically anywhere we want it, in the zero to 20 C range. And that’s important, because what might work great here in Texas, maybe it’s not the right temperature to store your heat at if you’re in Nevada, or in Wisconsin.”

Reimagining an Ancient Cooling Method

Ice battery technology isn’t new, reported The Washington Post, it is a high tech take on one of the ancient forms of cooling and air conditioning. People have been harvesting ice and storing it for thousands of years.

When shipping became faster, ice from the Great Lakes became a global industry with ice being the second -largest US export. Cotton was the first. Ice boxes were the way people kept food cold before the advent of electrical refrigerators and freezers.

While ice batteries are not being used to cool food, or to power electrical devices, they are being used to cool buildings. But there are limitations to where this technology is practical to use. Places where AC is used infrequently or where power companies have one price anytime of the day won’t benefit from ice batteries.

In Israel, which has a much hotter climate, a startup called Nostromo is using this technology in thermal cells called ice bricks. During peak hours, the ice thaws and cools buildings.

For now, combining ice batteries with other types of energy storage from renewables can help the power grid to keep up in hot weather as well as lowering the cost of electricity. It is a win/win for all.