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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)
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.
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
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
This is the ying and the yang of every decision. There is a side effect to everything.
The question is whether this kind of pollution is better than the carbon dioxide/refrigerant chemicals/coal power plant pollution. It is likely the answer is "yes".
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.