Ice Is Nice

New York Building Proves Ice Is Nice for Staying Cool Without Power-Hungry A/C Units

Beneath an iconic Manhattan skyscraper, something very cool is going on with the way it’s handling electricity bills.

While the appliances and lights of the never-sleeping-city begin to turn off for the night, the building switches on a massive ice machine, which by morning light could have made as much as 500,000 pounds of ice.

Then, when New Yorkers rush to turn on their AC units, Eleven Madison stays cool and cost-effective by using that ice to chill the air circulating through the building.

It’s just one of 4,000 buildings worldwide that have installed one of the ice-based cooling systems from Trane Technologies Commercial HVAC, a product which offers significant advantages to traditional AC.

The ice machine freezes water at night when the cost of electricity and the demand for it are both low. During late-spring and summer days in the Big Apple, when as much as 70% of all electricity available on the grid is being consumed for cooling buildings, the Trane Tech ice machine pumps air over the ice to cool it down—drastically reducing the amount of electricity the building consumes.

Trane says this can lower cooling costs by 40%—a big difference when cooling costs are predicted to be the highest for Americans in a decade.

“There are six million commercial buildings in the US alone, and a very small fraction of them have installations like this,” said Holly Paeper, president of Trane Technologies Americas. “So, when everyone else is using their electricity in the middle of July to cool their building or to cool their homes, it’s a big draw on the grid.”

The more that technologies like the kind which cools Eleven Madison can be adopted, the more that peak demand can be evened out and the more sensible renewable energy like solar and wind will be.