FAQ

Let’s use our customer Glendale Water & Power as an example. The City of Glendale has a peak demand of just over 300 MW. Typically one third of a utility’s peak demand is attributable to the package air conditioning units for which the Ice Bear was designed. In the case of Glendale, we did a full survey of every commercial building which confirmed over 100 MWs of peak-demand could be reduced by Ice Bear projects. From start to finish, we completed a MW scale deployment in Glendale in 6 months.

Ice Energy first contracts and trains local agents to conduct site surveys and sign-up building owners.  This process goes quickly: owners are generally easy to sign-up, because they receive free of charge an Ice Bear which lowers their utility bill, and often a new air-conditioner as well as part of the Ice Bear installation.

In parallel, Ice Energy partners with and trains local HVAC contractors, who perform the installation work as sites are identified and building owners signed up.

Ice Energy has capacity to manufacture 10MW per month of Ice Bears, and a city such as Glendale typically has HVAC contractors sufficient to install 3-5MW per month.

Ice Bears bring together diverse value streams from across the grid, such as:

• Adding peak capacity to the grid
• Reducing or eliminating the need for feeder and other distribution system upgrades
• Improving grid reliability
• Backing intermittent resources such as wind and solar
• Reducing transmission-system line losses and load factor
• Reducing customer electricity bills

 

As most of these values are primarily captured by utilities, we sell or contract Ice Bears to the utilities who can then pass on the value to their customers.

District cooling systems are generally large scale, custom-engineered systems designed for a specific building, usually a large facility such as an office tower or multi-building campus. They are typically designed into a building’s original construction and owned by the building owner. District cooling is not generally retrofitted or installed in MW-scale across a service territory.

Ice Energy’s Ice Bear systems are distributed storage which can be installed on most buildings which have 4-20 ton DX-based AC units. They are typically sold to utilities for use at customer locations, and can be installed in MW-scale on specific feeders or across a service territory.

Ice Bears don’t use any new science or unproven technology. They’re based on robust, thoroughly understood direct-expansion AC technology, because we need them to be proven and no-risk for our customers. What’s special about an Ice Bear is the design and engineering that allows us to deliver the most efficient distributed energy storage at the lowest cost and with extraordinary reliability.