City’s electricity power grid is under heavy load during on-peak hours throughout summer cooling season. As the result, many utility companies implemented the time-of-use rate of electricity leading to high electricity cost for customers with significant cooling needs. On the other hand, the need for electricity and/or cooling decreases greatly at night, creating excess electricity capacity for further utilization. An innovative ice energy storage system is being developed leveraging a unique supercooling-based ice production process. During off-peak hours, the proposed system stores the low-cost electric energy in the form of ice; during on-peak hours, the system releases the stored energy to meet extensive home cooling needs. Thus, it can not only reduce energy and cost of cooling, but also increase the penetration of renewable energies (especially wind energy). In this paper, the working principles of the system is presented along with the modeling details of the overall system and several key components. The simulink model takes in hourly temperature and peak/off peak electricity cost data to dynamically simulate the amount of energy required and associated cost for cooling an average home. Both energy consumption and cost for homes using the cooling system with ice energy storage in two US cities have been compared with those using conventional HVAC cooling system. According to the model, huge reduction in energy cost (up to 3X) can be achieved over 6 months of cooling season in regions with high peak electricity rates. While only moderate reduction on energy consumption is predicted for the ice energy storage system, further energy reduction potentials have been identified for future study.
A hybrid cooling, heating and power (HCHP) concept was recently demonstrated through a DOD innovative energy program. It included several high performance components for distributed energy systems and a unique drive-train design, which efficiently converts waste heat into useful energy in the form of cooling, heating and power depending upon the energy needs. Compared to a standard military environmental control unit (ECU) which puts an electric load on a diesel generator, the HCHP system uses engine exhaust heat as the primary energy input. Utilizing the exhaust heat can potentially provide 27% reduction on fuel consumption when operating in the cooling mode. When cooling is not needed, it is able to provide power output using engine waste heat — a potentially significant advantage over other heat activated cooling technologies.
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