Hillsborough County facilities being cooled by giant ice machines.
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Giant Ice blocks are being installed in a hillsborough county facilities building. An old idea from 1830's Florida is being resurrected to save millions of dollars in electricity.
Giant ice maker helping keep Hillsborough County facilities cooler
Tampa Bay Business Journal - August 18, 2006
Carl Cronan
TAMPA -- The climate inside Hillsborough County's downtown government buildings should be a bit cooler these days, despite soaring summer temperatures and regardless of the sometimes-heated proceedings inside courtrooms and chambers.
County officials worked with the Trane division of American Standard Cos. to build a $13.5 million chiller plant that provides air conditioning to seven different facilities within several blocks of each other. The system involves more than 7,000 feet, roughly 1.3 miles, of underground pipes sending chilled water to each building's air conditioning systems.
Buildings served by the system include the 28-story County Center building, the Edgecomb Courthouse, the historic Main Courthouse, the Courthouse Annex, the records center at 700 Twiggs St., the Hillsborough County Public Schools offices and the Rampello School for kindergarten through eighth grades.
Theoretically, the system will pay for itself in a little more than a decade, saving Hillsborough County an estimated $1.2 million in energy costs annually.
"That's a direct benefit to our taxpayers," said Randy Klindworth, energy manager with Hillsborough County's facilities management office. He noted that Trane guarantees a minimum savings of $583,000 per year.
"It's a really good partnership for us and for them," said Robert Garcia, VP of business development with Tampa Bay Trane, which handled installation and is in charge of maintenance of the chiller plant along Zack Street between Jefferson and Nebraska avenues.
Key components of the plant include a 1,500-ton ice-making machine, 84 thermal storage tanks and two massive compressors, all of which are used to send cold water through the pipes beneath sidewalks leading to various county buildings and diagonally under Chillura Square.
The chiller charges the ice tanks overnight, when electricity rates are lower than during peak hours of power use. The 28-degree ice is melted during the day to make chilled water that is sent to the five county and two school buildings, cooling roughly 1.5 million square feet of offices and administrative space.
The school board pays the county for the chilled water its buildings receive to cover the county's operating costs, but "we make no profit from it," Klindworth said.
The need for the chiller plant arose during construction of the Edgecomb Courthouse. The county had built an energy efficient central plant in 2001, but because of a lack of capital funding it could not implement the necessary capacity and piping to connect all of its downtown buildings to the system.
Klindworth said he mapped out a system on a napkin and Hillsborough County contracted with Trane to expand the central chiller plant and implement energy saving measures in county buildings.
"The larger the systems get, the more efficient they become," Garcia said. He compared the savings difference between having an individual power generator on one's home and being a customer of Tampa Electric Co., the latter being less expensive.
To further save the county money on energy costs, Trane uses a Tracer Summit computer system to monitor equipment performance and thermostat temperatures within all seven buildings. Any climate changes can be made with a mouse click from the chiller plant.
One other savings measure Klindworth is happy to point out is the plant's condensation collection system, which can catch 3 million gallons that would normally drip from an AC system and return it to service cooling county buildings.
"That's a lot of water that would just go into the ground," he said.
TAMPA -- The climate inside Hillsborough County's downtown government buildings should be a bit cooler these days, despite soaring summer temperatures and regardless of the sometimes-heated proceedings inside courtrooms and chambers.
County officials worked with the Trane division of American Standard Cos. to build a $13.5 million chiller plant that provides air conditioning to seven different facilities within several blocks of each other. The system involves more than 7,000 feet, roughly 1.3 miles, of underground pipes sending chilled water to each building's air conditioning systems.
Buildings served by the system include the 28-story County Center building, the Edgecomb Courthouse, the historic Main Courthouse, the Courthouse Annex, the records center at 700 Twiggs St., the Hillsborough County Public Schools offices and the Rampello School for kindergarten through eighth grades.
Theoretically, the system will pay for itself in a little more than a decade, saving Hillsborough County an estimated $1.2 million in energy costs annually.
"That's a direct benefit to our taxpayers," said Randy Klindworth, energy manager with Hillsborough County's facilities management office. He noted that Trane guarantees a minimum savings of $583,000 per year.
"It's a really good partnership for us and for them," said Robert Garcia, VP of business development with Tampa Bay Trane, which handled installation and is in charge of maintenance of the chiller plant along Zack Street between Jefferson and Nebraska avenues.
Key components of the plant include a 1,500-ton ice-making machine, 84 thermal storage tanks and two massive compressors, all of which are used to send cold water through the pipes beneath sidewalks leading to various county buildings and diagonally under Chillura Square.
The chiller charges the ice tanks overnight, when electricity rates are lower than during peak hours of power use. The 28-degree ice is melted during the day to make chilled water that is sent to the five county and two school buildings, cooling roughly 1.5 million square feet of offices and administrative space.
The school board pays the county for the chilled water its buildings receive to cover the county's operating costs, but "we make no profit from it," Klindworth said.
The need for the chiller plant arose during construction of the Edgecomb Courthouse. The county had built an energy efficient central plant in 2001, but because of a lack of capital funding it could not implement the necessary capacity and piping to connect all of its downtown buildings to the system.
Klindworth said he mapped out a system on a napkin and Hillsborough County contracted with Trane to expand the central chiller plant and implement energy saving measures in county buildings.
"The larger the systems get, the more efficient they become," Garcia said. He compared the savings difference between having an individual power generator on one's home and being a customer of Tampa Electric Co., the latter being less expensive.
To further save the county money on energy costs, Trane uses a Tracer Summit computer system to monitor equipment performance and thermostat temperatures within all seven buildings. Any climate changes can be made with a mouse click from the chiller plant.
One other savings measure Klindworth is happy to point out is the plant's condensation collection system, which can catch 3 million gallons that would normally drip from an AC system and return it to service cooling county buildings.
"That's a lot of water that would just go into the ground," he said.
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