Ice storage rooftop retrofit for rooftop air conditioning
- Oak Ridge National Lab., TN (United States)
- Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville (United States)
A significant fraction of the floor space in commercial and federal buildings is cooled by single-package rooftop air conditioning units. These units are located on flat roofs and usually operate during the day under hot conditions. They are usually less energy efficient than a chiller system for building cooling. Several U.S. companies are developing systems that employ ice storage in conjunction with chillers to replace older, inefficient rooftop units for improved performance and minimal use of on-peak electricity. Although the low evaporator temperatures needed for ice making tend to reduce the efficiency of the chiller, the overall operating costs of the ice storage system may be lower than that of a packaged, conventional rooftop installation. One version of this concept, the Roofberg{reg_sign} System developed by the Calmac Corporation, was evaluated on a small building at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The Roofberg system consists of a chiller, an ice storage tank, and one or more rooftop units whose evaporator coils have been adapted to use a glycol solution for cooling. The ice storage component decouples the cooling demand of the building from the operation of the chiller. Therefore, the chiller can operate at night (cooler, more efficient condensing temperatures) to meet a daytime cooling demand. This flexibility permits a smaller chiller to satisfy a larger peak cooling load. Further, the system can be operated to shift the cooling demand to off-peak hours when electricity from the utility is generated more efficiently and at lower cost. This Roofberg system was successfully installed last year on a small one-story office building in Oak Ridge and is currently being operated to cool the building. The building and system were sufficiently instrumented to allow a determination of the performance and efficiency of the Roofberg system. Although the energy efficiency of a simulated Roofberg storage/chiller concept operating in the full storage mode was about equal to what could be expected through a simple rooftop efficiency upgrade, the operating costs for the Roofberg system could be much more favorable depending on the utility rate structure. The ability of Roofberg to move much of the cooling load to off-peak periods enables it to take advantage of on-peak demand charges and time-of-use electricity rates. The Roofberg system, as installed, was able to reduce the on-peak energy use of the cooling system to 35% of the on-peak energy consumption of the baseline system. A comparative analysis of a rooftop replacement and Roofberg indicated that the Roofberg system on Building 2518 would be the better economic choice over a range of demand charges and on-off peak energy prices which are typical of utility rate tariffs for commercial buildings.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Research, Washington, DC (United States); USDOE Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-96OR22464
- OSTI ID:
- 614264
- Report Number(s):
- ORNL/CON-451; ON: DE98054476
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: Sep 1997
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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