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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."
Will this not cause the lake to warm up? What are the envirnmental effects of this? Have they been considered?
This is the kind of stuff I like to see :)
Ok, it costs a lot of money, but in the long run it has the possibility to save so much more than money: the enviroment.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
From the diagram, it looks like the cooling water goes into the city water supply where normally the cooling effect would have been lost as the water flowed through the city's water infrastructure. Conceptually it looks like co-generation, but for cooling.
For me, at least, this is what renewables should be about: finding a local source of economical renewable energy, and applying the appropriate technology to make it useful. The key thing, though, is that the methods change depending on what's availible locally.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Because some folks understand how fragile a natural balance can be, are prepared to look further than immediate future and don't swallow everything they read as gospel.
;)
Removing the cold water will increase the overall temperature of the lake, that much is certain. Not by much, but over an extended period of time it may make a big enough difference to be damaging. So it is possible that this perceived 'green' project might just be switching one kind of damage to the environment for another. Before anyone strawmans me I'm not saying this project will definitely destroy the lakes ecosystem or that the removal of the water will be sufficient to warm it enough to cause problems. Just that it is a possibility. Frankly I'd be more worried if people were not asking this question.
To me it seems to me more about freeing up electrical energy in the area to ease power distribution problems rather than an attempt to be eco-friendly. Which is a goal with its own merits. It has been painted 'green' to increase its profile and encourage its acceptance. But then I am a level 16 cynic.
No, the point is that environmentalists don't want alternative fuels or alternative practices. They want less technology. Less tech = less electric used. I'll probably get modded as troll or funny, but I'm serious. Wind energy is touted - until someone wants to use it (New England wind-farm fight).
What's the alternative here? Apparently there is none, so we better just not cool those homes.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
One of the hardest things in science is trying to dumb it down so the common Joe can understand it.
But, won't introducing warm water back into the lake add new convection currents that will stir things up, affect the lake's organisms, and add certain cleaning chemicals/pollution?
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer." -Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
Even if they are not putting the warmed water back into the lake, the removal of cold water will raise the average temperature of the water (as warmer surface water has more of an impact on the overall lake) and will cause the lake to get warmer. We've done enough (I'm from Toronto) to screw up the environment around this city, we should NOT be doing this!
Yeah, the equivelent of eight extra seconds of sunlight hitting the lake will be death to the entire eco-system! Run away, run away! Burn freighters full of fuel and oil instead! (RTFA if you don't get the reference)
Get a grip. YOU have a much bigger impact on the eco-system every day you use heat, airconditioning, refridgeration, eat, sleep, shit, work or play.
The hydrocarbins the manufacture and use of the computer you typed your comments on probably have a larger impact on global warming than this entire project. The Canadian's approach is the smartest solution to this problem that anyone has come up with in a long time. Is it scalable to every city on the coast of that lake? No (8 seconds of sunlight is one thing, eight days equivelent would be another), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing it in order to reduce the consumption of power in other areas.
Nothing is a panacea, but this is a damn sound solution for Toronto, and they get to do it by being there first. Any overall solution to our energy, global warming, etc. problems will involve numerous clever solutions, and this project stands a good chance of being a part of that solution.
And as for impacting the environment: 6 billion people breathing the air impact the environment. If you truly don't want to have an impact, slit your wrists. Oops, your decaying flesh will still have an impact, so you're out of luck there too. Better get used to it, because people do have an effect, and they always will. The impact of this project is benign and minimal, compared to every other public works project out there, including the sewage system in your town you probably make use of multiple times every day.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Canadian Department?
Corona!?
You know nothing of this country, do you?
You and me both :P.
Just to amplify your already excellent response, the other thing people here are forgetting is that Lake Ontario isn't a closed hydrolic system. It is fed by hundreds of rivers which dump tons of sun-warmed water into the lake in summer, and which dump tons of frozen and near-freezing water into it during the winter and spring thaws.
This input vastly outnumbers the amount of cold water the Enwave system will be extracting, along with vastly outnumbering the amount of warm water input to the lake.
In the end, the lake will be the same as it's always been, and less air-polluting fossil fuels will be required to run the existing air conditioning systems. Looks like a win-win situation to me.
Yaz.
Actually, since the Arctic Polar Icecap is floating on the sea, it is an iceberg.
True, but since glaciers also form on land they cannot be considered icebergs, and therefore...
glacier != iceberg
What I like about this project is how it has the same effect of taking 8000 or so vehicals off the streets. So much fuel saved!
... the 3mgp increase he fought against would have saved 3 times the oil the US imports from Iraq ... saving far more oil than could ever be produced by raping and pillaging that world heritage park in Alaska.
... which only a blind dumbass piece of shit fool ever thought was about terrorism ... Thanks to Dubyafucker destroying the relative stability that was there, huge uncertainties have been created in the oil markets, more than doubling the price of oil over the last couple years! just LAST MONTH ALONE you damn americans sent $190BILLION dollars to the middle east buying oil. HALF of that money could have stayed in your pockets, out of the hands of the saudis. ... out of the hands of the Bin Laden family that has a huge involvement in middle east oil.
... paying back the gift a thousand times over.
.. and $100Million from the Province of British Columbia, Canada, who tried to ease the shortage by selling more electricity to California ..WHO NEVER PAID THE DAMN BILL, taking money out of MY pocket!!!
...
And that has the effect of pissing off george W bush!
why?
because everything that motherfucker has done as president has directly or indirectly benefitted his oil industry friends.
dubya fought against increasing the average fuel efficiency of vehicals produced for the US market
dubya sued california to force that state to stop increasing its fuel efficiency plans, so that you send more money to his saudi oil friends.
when dubya announced his hydrogen economy plan, the same bill silently spent 5 times more money on subsidies for the oil industry.
And that Iraq thing
but of course the Bin Laden family gave the Bush family $1.4billion dollars over the last couple decades, buying favour with the powerful american family who has been very happy to respond by sending your brothers and sisters to their deaths to get the oil price up
And that's just oil, lets not forget how right after the election, the electricity shortage in california started, and didn't end until the republicans had won the senate. This 'shortage' has since been revealed to have been totally false, artificially created by friends of the Bush family in the energy industry who intentionally shut down powerplants to reduce supply, to more than double electricity prices. The friends of Bush stole $30 BILLION from the american public through this scam
in conclusion
YAY Toronto! anything that reduces energy consumption, that in effect fights against the most corrupt piece of shit president the USA has ever had is a very very good thing.