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."

Comments

Environmental effects

[jonbryce]

Will this not cause the lake to warm up? What are the envirnmental effects of this? Have they been considered?

Re:Environmental effects

[black mariah]

The water at the bottom of the lake isn't special. The only reason it's cold is because it's so far away from the surface that it can't be heated by the sun, and the water on top helps wick away any heat that might build up. Go dive into a lake. The first few inches of the surface might be warm, but down as little as five feet you're looking at a significant drop in temperature, and it just gets colder as it goes down.

Re:Environmental effects

[VeryProfessional]

We have to recognise that any interaction we have with the environment is going to have some impact on it. This impact will by definition be negative if we characterise any change to the existing equilibrium as being negative. The smart thing to do is to spread the impact by interacting in lots of different ways on a lower level, rather than abusing a single resource, as we currently do with fossil fuels.

I applaud what they are doing in Canada. The more alternative energy sources we use, the better.

Re:Environmental effects

[gowen]

The problem is that after thewind has past through that, it's no longer strong enough to push clouds,

Do you have a source for this. I find it extremely difficult to believe, given the height of clouds, compared to the height of wind turbines...

Re:Environmental effects

[An dochasac]

Forgot the link, and me login: Toronto's solution will have far less impact than Milwaukee's solution of building more coal power plants which will suck 2.2 billion gallons of water and fish from Lake Michigan every day and convert it to mercury contaminated steam, or discharge it at a much higher temperature... all in order to inefficiently cool buildings to the temperature of lake michigan, a stone's throw away from the power plant. Can I burn some karma points with a duh here? Canadian industry finally cops onto an idea that every 7-year-old has when his toes are in 40F degree water and his head in 100F air. If only American industry wern't so hung up on our industrial past, we could see the way to the future.

Re:Actually, water DOES flow down hill

[gowen]

The scematic does not show the back half of the municipal system (sewer and waste water treatment).

Well, yes, it does. Eventually. But by that time, the heat it gained in the exchangers has long been dissipated, so it's irrelevant. Waste water from this source will be no warmer than the waste water that was previously reaching Lake Ontario.

Re:Convection?

[Emperor Igor]

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".