Ice is Nice at Eleven Madison's Met Life North Building
- Editor OGN Daily
- 1 hour ago
- 2 min read
Beneath a famous Manhattan skyscraper, something surprisingly cool and innovative is going on.
When the city that never sleeps begin to turn off their lights and other appliances for the night, Eleven Madison switches on a humungous ice machine, which by morning has made around 500,000 pounds (227,000 kgs) of ice. Then, when New Yorkers power up their AC units, Eleven Madison stays cool and cost-effective by using that ice to chill the air circulating through the building.
The building also houses Eleven Madison Park, the plant-based fine dining restaurant with 4 stars from The New York Times and 3 stars from the Michelin Guide, and is just one of 4,000 buildings worldwide that have installed one of the ice-based cooling systems from Trane Technologies Commercial HVAC, a product which offers significant advantages to traditional AC. Or, as the company's strap line says: "Right now. Right tomorrow".
The ice machine freezes water at night when the cost of electricity and the demand for it are both low. During warm days in the Big Apple, when around three quarters of all electricity available on the grid is being consumed for cooling buildings, the Trane Tech ice machine pumps air over the ice to cool it down and pumps it around the skyscraper - drastically reducing the amount of electricity the building consumes.
Trane says this can lower cooling costs by 40 percent - a huge difference when cooling costs are predicted to be the highest for Americans in a decade. Another important feature is that, by not tapping into the grid when everyone else is, it helps reduce peak demand - thereby allowing renewable energy from wind and solar to better perform their roles, rather than requiring dirty oil and gas power to cover demand surges.