Cool Idea: ‘Energy of the future' flows into downtown Toronto

" clean, renewable, reliable energy. Compared to traditional air-conditioning, Deep Lake Water Cooling reduces electricity use by 75 per cent and will eliminate 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of taking 8,000 cars off of the streets of Toronto."

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.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040817.water0817/BNStory/National/

I hope that other cities around the Great Lakes that take their drinking water from one of the lakes will keep a good lookout on this project. Chicago comes to mind.

Really, this is a gigantic heat pump. I wonder if it would be possible to extract heat or cold in the same way from the discharged, treated wastewater. That would benefit just about every municipality in the western world!

It might even be worth investigating whether it would possible to lay closed loop pipes under ocean or harbor waters for cities on salt water bodies that would operate in the same way. Of course, the environmental effect of cooling the sea floor in the winter and warming it in the summer must be thoroughly investigated.

Or, they just pump it to and from the ground. Doing it on such a large scale is very interesting, but I hope somebody is doing an environmental impact statement.

cold water. As you mentioned, a solid environmental assessment would need to be done. I would think that even though the climate in the Puget Sound basin is milder than the Great Lakes region, the salt water in the sound is fed by glacial runoff and is quite cold. Unprotected, a human only has 15-20 minutes in the open water any time of year. It is that cold at the surface.

In additon to Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, Milwaukee and others come to mind.

I am going to bring this to the attention of agencies and/or representatives who might know how to get some investigation into this for the Puget Sound region. This article was the first that I heard of this.