Your future air conditioner might act like a battery
New cooling technologies that incorporate energy storage could help by charging themselves when renewable electricity is available and demand is low, and still providing cooling services when the grid is stressed.
“We say, take the problem, and turn it into a solution,” says Yaron Ben Nun, founder and chief technology officer of Nostromo Energy.
One of Nostromo Energy’s systems, which it calls an IceBrick, is basically a massive ice cube tray. It cools down a solution made of water and glycol that’s used to freeze individual capsules filled with water. One IceBrick can be made up of thousands of these containers, which each hold about a half-gallon, or roughly two liters, of water.
Insulation keeps the capsules frozen until it’s time to use them to help cool down a building. Then the ice is used to drop the temperature of the water-glycol mixture, which in turn cools down the water that circulates in the building’s chilling system. The whole thing is designed to work as an add-on with existing equipment, Ben Nun says.
Nostromo installed its first system in the US in 2023, at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles. It has a capacity of 1.4 megawatt-hours, and it also serves the neighboring Waldorf Astoria. The installation contains 40,000 capsules, amounting to about 150,000 pounds of ice. It usually charges up for 10 to 12 hours, starting at night and finishing around midday. That leaves it ready to discharge its cooling power between the late afternoon and evening, when demand on the grid is high and solar power is dropping off as the sun sets.
Using the IceBrick increases the total electricity needed for cooling, as some energy is lost to inefficiency during the cycle. But the goal is to decrease the energy demand during peak hours, which can cut costs for building owners, Ben Nun says. The company is in the process of securing roughly $300 million in funding, in part from the US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, to fully finance 200 of these systems in California, he adds.
NOSTROMO
While building owners can benefit immediately from these individual energy storage solutions, the real potential to help the grid comes when systems are linked together, Ben Nun says.
When the grid is extremely stressed, utility companies are sometimes forced to shut off electricity supply to some areas, leaving people there without power when they need it most. Technologies that can adjust to meet the grid’s needs could help reduce reliance on these rolling blackouts.
