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Cooling Toronto Using Lake Ontario
An anonymous reader writes "Air cooled by the frigid waters deep in Lake Ontario started bringing relief to buildings in downtown Toronto on Tuesday after the valves were symbolically opened on the multi-million-dollar project. The company says that they have the capacity to air condition 100 office buildings or 8,000 homes - the equivalent of 32 million square feet of building space. They note that the cooling system reduces energy usage, freeing up megawatts from the Ontario's electrical grid, minimizes ozone-depleting refrigerants and reduces the amount of carbon dioxide entering the air."
Q1 is a valid concern.
Q2 is apparently answered in the article. Approx 25% of the energy requirements for electrical air con.
No it won't, because the water used to cool the air is the same water that would be extracted anyway, to provide potable water to the city. See this schematic. Notice the warm water is not returned to Lake Ontario.
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This has been covered extensively on Discovery Canada, which I watch regularly. Here's a quote that puts this into perspective:
...He said environmental studies show the system will cause a temperature increase [each year] equivalent to the heat the lake surface absorbs during seven seconds of sunshine....
-Toronto cools off using Lake Ontario waters
According to the site they use the city water supply
that feeds from the bottom of the lake to cool down
a closed loop system, which is then used to cool down the offices/homes. No warm water is fed back into the lake. So the lake should not heat up at all.
RTFA !
Look at the diagram on http://www.enwave.com/enwave/dlwc/ They warm up the city's drinking water by a few degrees.
A
I think this is unlikely to be a problem.
Lakes 'turn over' like this when there has been long-term stratification of the water. Stratification occurs when a layer of warm, less dense, water forms over the colder, denser, lower layers. This is stable since the heat of the sun reinforces the stratification. Only a seasonal reduction in sunlight, or strong winds, can mix the layers.
Lake Nyos is in a tropical area where there is a permanent, marked stratication due to year-round abundant sunlight. Since mixing of layers is so rare, hug amounts of gas can accumulate in lower layers. This is dangerous should something trigger a rapid breakdown of the stratification - such as the landslide in Nyos.
In temperate areas stratification is confined to the summer, only then is there sufficient sunlight. In other seasons stratification breaks down and mixing occurs such that a potentially dangerous build up of gas is not possible.
As a grandson of a plumber I can confirm that the water does eventually end up back in the lake. Rule #1 of plumbing ...water flows down hill.
The beauty of this implementation is that the incremental warming of the water may actually further save energy if slightly warmer water comes into water heaters. From a thermodynamic standpoint this looks like a very large geothermal system. The economies of scale may make it quite cost effective too.
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I'm annoyed by all this hysterical nonsense over environmental effects on the lake. Apart from the fact that the heat input is trivial given the size of the lake (do you know what the heat capacity of 393 cubic miles of water is?) People think the lake is not some finite reservoir of coolness - no, it's a heat store, it cools down in the winter people! Consider the hitorical effect of tens of thouands of summers if that were not true.
In all this ranting, the very real envirnoemental benfits of reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions get lost in the noise. I'd have expected better from the so-called technically literate.
Man, I can't believe I'm getting sucked into this moronic, paranoiac debate.
.000000293 btu's per megawatt hour = 2* 10 ^9th Megawatt hours needed.
1 - Lake Ontario doesn't freeze over, but it does have some surface ice in midwinter. Ice implies a surface temp at or below 0 degrees c. Right?
2 - Having lived next to another sizeable lake (Lake Champlain, which typically does freeze over), and as an EXPERT in hydrodynamic modelling, I can assure you that that niggling little physics detail about water having maximum density at... (drum roll) 4 degrees C is accurate. However, twice a year, lakes like Ontario have all their water churned about as ambient average temp falls below 4 degrees C, then as ambient temp rises above 4 c. Wierd, but true. Frankly, seiche's are wierder.
3 - So, as winter gets cold enough, any water not AT 4 degrees C rolls to the surface, where it is... say it with me... chilled by the Toronto winters. Before any ice is made, everything in the lake chills to 4 degrees C (this is my biggest oversimplification here, since inversion layers can exist in large water bodies. It doesn't matter in the overall calcs to follow, since all I was interested in showing is the mechanics for recharge of the cold zone).
4 - The thermal mass of Lake Ontario (one site says 86 m average depth, x 19,000 km^2 in area... 19,000,000,000 x 86 x 100 ^3 cm^3 per meter x 1 degree c x 0.0039683 btu's per calorie x
The Fact Sheet on Enwave's site says they're gonna free up 59 megawatts. Now, I should be able to disregard a part of this as an efficiency improvement (electricity for cooling is gawdawfully inefficient, compared to non-compressive heat exchangers like this'll use), but I'll eat the inefficiency because that's the nice guy I am. 59 x 24 x 365 (megawatt-years to megawatt-hours) gets us *finally* to matching units. If I haven't completely bolluxed the calculation, we're looking at a capability of handling 3673 of these facilities. Or, the temp of Lake O going up 1/3673 of a degree.
Oh. Yay. The little fishies aren't even going to notice this. In fact, there's room for exporting this capability and if we're willing to warm Lake O by a few degrees I think it'd take care of the AC demands of most of North America, if them clever Canadians can just figure out a way to export this.
When she's working hard, the sun 'wastes' enough energy warming up dirt and water around the world to fuel our needs a thousandfold over. When she's not paying attention (at the poles, nights and winters), earth's radiating it off like gangbusters.
The risk of us boogering up our surroundings when we do BIG things is a valid one. But not here, not yet.
We've reached the point where we're influencing the world in several spots: cfc's, pesticides, acid rain, particulate emissions, garbage, animal populations, etc. etc. etc.
But this isn't one of them. As a side joke, I bet there are a few million Toronto residents that'd be more than happy to let the thermal average temp of Lake O go up 30 degrees, just for the lake-effect warmth it'd impart on their town each winter and the ability to swim without turning blue in midsummer. Back during a nasty winter ('93), a favorite bumper sticker of mine was 'Another Vermonter *for* global warming'.
Rock on Toronto & Enwave.com
A similar lake source cooling project was implemented at Cornell while I was there. They tore up half the campus laying 36" pipe down to the nearby lake. Of course this project is much larger (with a larger lake as well), but from what I have heard the Cornell project has been a success despite the hand wringing of the radical environmentalist. The Toronto plan seems to be even better as they are not discharging the water directly back to the lake (as they do in Ithaca) but are processing it for drinking water. more information on the Cornell LSC website http://www.utilities.cornell.edu/LSC/default.htm
Warming up a lake a few degrees would take a ridiculous amount of energy, more than any city could possibly put into a lake. Calculate it, it takes 4.184 joules to warm up one gram of water one degree C. There are 1640 km^3 of water in Lake Ontario. That's 1 640 000 000 000 cubic meters, which is 1.64 × 10^18 grams. 1.64e18 * 1.0 deg C * 4.184 J/g-degC = 6.87e18 J. This is 1906044444444 kilowatt-hours, which is a hell of a lot.
I assumed standard water (1 kg/L) when converting from volume to mass. I also used only two significant digits for specific heat capacity (4.2 kJ/KgK). I also assumed uniform temperature and uniform heat distribution because I'm looking for averages, to get an idea of order of magnitude.
Anyway, I RTFA and saw that the cooling power is only about 207 megawatts. That convinced me to rule out any macroscopic environmental consequences and get on with my life.
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