District Cooling
- General Description: District cooling systems distribute chilled water or other media to multiple buildings
for air conditioning or other uses. The cooling (actually heat rejection) is usually provided from a dedicated
cooling plant.
- Cornell University Lake Source Cooling Project
- List of Commercial District Cooling Systems
- History: District cooling has its roots in early nineteenth-century schemes to distribute clean, cool
air to houses through underground pipes. None of these is known to have been built, and district cooling did not
begin until the Colorado Automatic Refrigerator Company began operating in Denver in late 1889. Many early systems
supplied ammonia and brine for refrigeration of meat, as well as cooling restaurants, theatres and other public
buildings. Large district cooling systems were built in the 1930s in Rockefeller Center and the United States Capitol
complex. Descriptions and details about these early systems will be added to these pages.
- Current applications: District cooling is now widely used in downtown business districts and institutional
settings such as college campuses. A list of all commercial district cooling companies will be included here, as
well as significant institutional systems.
- Energy Storage
- Deep Water Source Cooling
- District Cooling in Stockholm
- Trigen Energy Corporation owns several district cooling systems.
- Brooklyn Union Gas and its subsidiaries are involved in
several district cooling systems.
- Technology: This section will include information on the various types of apparatus found in district
cooling systems.
- Refrigerants: District cooling, like all forms of artificial refrigeration, requires some type of refrigerant,
such as CFCs. Information on this topic will be included here. For now, you can check out some web sites about
ozone depletion at CIESIN, Greenpeace,
and another here.
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