Azusa Light & Water and Ice Energy Partner on Residential Thermal Energy Storage
Azusa Light & Water (Azusa) announced today a successful milestone in a research project aimed at proving the potential for successful deployment of Ice Energy’s thermal energy storage system for residential applications, called the Ice Cub. As part of the project, supported by a DEED technology research grant from the American Public Power Association (APPA), Azusa recently completed deployment of two smaller design variants of Ice Energy’s original Ice Bear™ thermal energy storage system at two Azusa residences.
Azusa Light & Water General Manager George Morrow said, “We are excited to explore the tremendous potential of residential thermal energy storage cooling applications on behalf of our citizens and the more than 2,000 members of the APPA who helped fund this technology research project. The future savings for individual residential customers could be significant and even more importantly, when deployed at scale, residential thermal energy storage systems in cooling applications could cut untold millions from the peak power expenses of municipalities across the country.”
The goal of the project is to prove the capability of the modified Ice Bear systems in residential deployments. Ice Energy is using the results of the project to support its ongoing R&D efforts to develop its residential Ice Cub ™, a thermal energy storage solution for residential cooling applications that the company expects to commercialize and bring to market in 2016.
Azusa Light & Water has a proven track record with Ice Bears, using them since 2005 to help reduce summer peak capacity requirements set by refrigerant-based air conditioning in Commercial facilities. Azusa uses these thermal energy storage units at major city facilities including the City’s public library, event center and gymnasium, police station headquarters, City’s critical data centers, Azusa Light & Water main offices, and the Utility’s largest customer, Azusa Pacific University.
Ice Energy President Mike Hopkins remarked, “We are grateful for the support of Azusa and the grant from APPA. This effort has helped accelerate our R&D efforts aimed at the residential marketplace. Cooling applications consume nearly 10% of all power in the residential sector in the USA and we believe this is a massive new market for distributed energy storage and peak load management that forward thinking utilities like Azusa are getting ready to tackle.”
About Azusa Light & Water
Azusa Light & Water was established around the turn of the century, making it one of the oldest municipal utilities in Southern California and the West. The utility serves approximately 25,000 water and 16,000 electric retail customers with reliable water and electricity at competitive rates through an electric system that includes 2 substations, 20 circuits and about 100 miles of electric lines. The peak demand of approximately 65 megawatts usually occurs in the early evening during the late summer making Azusa a perfect candidate for the Ice Bear and Ice Cub distributed thermal energy storage technologies.
About Ice Energy
Since 2003, Ice Energy has provided utilities more than 22 million hours of the most reliable, cost-effective and green distributed energy capacity available. ice-energy.com