The ice age is here again, and the utilities are paying.
By Michael Kanellos
If they can pull it off, sheets of ice will soon cover large swaths of the California power grid.
The
Southern California Public Power Authority and Ice Energy will tomorrow
talk about a strategy to deploy ice air conditioners on a broad scale
in the region in part by shifting the burden of paying for a new air
conditioner from the building owner to a utility. In one community in
the program, a utility will pay for the air conditioners and own them as
its own asset.
Collectively, the air conditioners slated for
deployment in Southern California could lead to 53 megawatts worth of
energy storage. Put another way, the air conditioner/energy storage
units could provide 64 gigawatt hours of daytime power each year. Fifty
megawatts of power can be shaved from daytime demand with about 6,500 of
the company's Ice Bear units, executives have said.
Ice air
conditioners work by effectively shifting the power required to run air
conditioners from the middle of the afternoon, when power costs the most
and demand is highest, to nighttime, when utilities often have to dump
the power they generate because of slack demand.
In short, the
machines make ice at night. As it melts, the chill is transferred to
heat exchangers and distributed through a building. The six hours of
chill the ice can provide can ideally get most buildings though the bulk
of the day. The giant icemakers often sit beneath parking lots.
Ice
air conditioners have been around since the 1920s, when movie theaters
used to deploy them to draw crowds on hot summer days. (And long before
that, Roman Emperor Varius Avitus had snow mounds brought to his garden
to generate cool breezes. It was a highlight of his reign -- Edward
Gibbon and others rank him as the worst emperor Rome ever had.) In more
recent times, ice air conditioners have been placed in shopping centers
and university buildings.
Still, ice air conditioners represent
only a fraction of the market. Ice Energy has been pushing to accelerate
sales by changing incentives and ownership structures. The company used
to sell the systems directly to building owners. Unfortunately, payback
can take years, if it ever takes place at all. Some ice air
conditioners actually use more power than regular air conditioners:
unless a building owner participates in a net metering program, they
could end up being worse off.
Utilities, however, consistently
benefit from them because of the reduction in peak power demand they can
create. Air conditioners can account for as much as 50 percent of
electricity consumption in California, and even more in hotter places
like Dubai. As a result, Ice Energy shifted strategies and began to sell
its units to utilities as devices for peak shaving. In this light, the
ice air conditioners function like demand response systems, eliminating a
chunk of daytime power needs, without the networking. It just happens
on a daily basis.
Three U.S. representatives last year proposed a
bill that would provide business owners and consumers a 30 percent tax
credit for installing ice systems as well, which would help spur demand
in places where utility-based programs don't exist. It could also help
defray costs for the utility.
Calmac, which also makes ice air
conditioners, recently installed a giant system in New York's Bank of
America building. Now, the only thing the market is missing is an
endorsement from Otzi, the ice man of the Alps.