What is it about?
How best to provide cooling in commercial buildings? There are electric chillers - either air-cooled or water-cooied, and there are heat-driven absorption chillers. The natural gas driven absoprtion chiller uses less water than the electric options for the current US power grid.
Featured Image
Photo by Lance Asper on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Especially when there are constraints on water availability, choice of cooling systems should consider water use as well as system cost, performance, and energy efficiency.
Perspectives
For electric systems, the amount of water used depends on how much water is used in the electricity system, both cooling water for thermal power plants and upsteam water use to provide fuel. For absorption systems driven by natural gas there is also water use in cooling and power production. The grid electricity system has more distant water use, with consumption effects farther away from the building being cooled.
Valerie M. Thomas
Georgia Institute of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Water consumption in absorption chillers is not negligible: Water-for-cooling consumption of chiller systems for commercial buildings in the United States, Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments, July 2024, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.seta.2024.103827.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
