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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?
but then I had a better question: Can it cool my 64-bit prescott?
(1). What will happen when the lake water will be warmed up? Ok,it will perhaps take a long time,but...
(2). How does the energy required for pumping / distributing the water and maintaining pipelines and machinery compares with electrical conditioneers?
Said that, it looks like a nice idea.-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
Halliburton, Bechtel and General Electric have signed a multi-billion dollar deal to refrigerate the waters of Lake Ontario.
The temperature of the lake has inexplicably begun to rise. Algae blooms, moss growing on surronding trees and Corona beer bottles scattered on the shore have alarmed the Canadian Department of the Interior to take swift, albeit expensive action the save the ecosystem of the lake.
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
John St. Pumping Station has obviously found some way of overcoming The Second Law of Thermodynamics as:
'the water's cold will be extracted and used to lower the temperature in downtown buildings'.
Unit for Cold anyone?
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.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
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
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".