Your process, for example cooling your (agricultural) product, uses a lot of energy. This cooling can only be done with electricity; the cooling has to run 24/7, but the sun shines for only 12 hours a day.

You need cold, for example to cool milk, vegetables or chemical products. Your goal is not to store electricity. Your goal is to cool the process!

On warm days, the ice battery also gives a boost. Your cooling installation runs at 100% and cannot cool any further, while your process heats up. With the ice battery you can still cool enough during these peaks.

With our storage, we turn the energy peak directly into cold. That saves one energy conversion, so it is more efficient.

Climate change and the predicted warming of the planet make efficient solutions for cooling buildings and entire residential districts increasingly important. Energy-efficient air conditioning has become an essential part of designing new buildings. Conventional air conditioning systems, however, need considerable amounts of energy to produce cooling, especially on hot summer days. They reach their limits when it comes to reducing energy costs and the environmental impact of air conditioning.

Ice batteries offer new possibilities and savings potential: they can absorb peaks in cooling demand and, as a storage system for ‘cold energy’, temporarily store a surplus of energy from renewable sources. These and other properties make ice batteries attractive for climate control in buildings.

The solar energy from your office building can make the ice build up cheaply at the weekend, so your employees can work at their best during working hours!

Diagram: district heating and cooling network with ice storage

1. Process residual heat from solar thermal energy, PV surplus or industrial waste heat
2. sp.ICE ice storage for flexible, temporary storage of surplus energy
3. The heating circuit supplies low-temperature district heating to the connected buildings (usually 5-20 °C)
4. Heat pumps use the low temperature of the local heat to generate heating energy efficiently. At the same time, cooling energy is produced.
5. The cooling energy from the cooling circuit can be used for building cooling or industrial process cooling

Some spaces depend heavily on a reliable cooling supply and continuous cooling. Think of operating theatres in hospitals, server rooms, data centres and certain industrial installations. In pharmaceutical production, even small temperature fluctuations can make entire batches of medicine unusable.

In a data centre, a cooling failure can cause servers to shut down and become unavailable. In such temperature-sensitive environments, emergency cooling is usually provided. As a backup cooling system, ice batteries offer several advantages over conventional chillers.

• The ice battery can easily be integrated into existing cooling systems.
• The ice battery needs little maintenance.
• Fire safe.
• Ice batteries do not use refrigerants that harm the environment.

An ice battery stores cold as ice. For emergency cooling, cold is available immediately. The full capacity is available as long as the tank is at 0 °C.

The required power depends on the discharge time. A sp.ICE-20′ delivers, for example, 397 kW for 6 hours and 238 kW for 10 hours. A sp.ICE-40′ delivers 827 kW for 6 hours.