ASHRAE Journal - July 2020 - 39

TECHNICAL FEATURE

Conclusion: Be Thorough in Your Engineering Analysis
Electriﬁcation of buildings is a daunting task, and it
will take lots of innovations and many types of systems
to make it happen. But, just as the electric grid can be
made carbon free, we, the heating and refrigeration
experts, can make buildings carbon free. While the speciﬁc system described in this article applies primarily to
large buildings in dense urban environments that have
large winter cooling loads (similar to "legacy" commercial ofﬁce buildings in New York) the integration of thermal storage can be helpful in many other situations.
For example, buildings that have excess solar energy
available (whether thermal or PV) can beneﬁt from storing it in thermal storage. And water storage tanks could
also be used in a storage source heat pump system if the
space is available. In suburban or rural areas, ground
source heat pumps may be the better solution because
of the land available for ground coils and wells. In all of
these cases, wasting energy and water to the atmosphere
through free cooling while consuming fossil fuel energy in
the same 24-hour period to heat the space can be avoided

by combining the use of heat pumps and thermal storage.
To the layperson, the term coefﬁcient of performance
seems incomprehensible, and the idea of putting in one
unit of energy and getting out three to six times that energy
seems beyond wishful thinking. But to an HVAC engineer,
it is just plain thermodynamics. Likewise, getting energy
to heat a building by turning cold water into ice may seem
entirely backwards, but it is just plain thermodynamics.
Very helpfully, Mother Nature has supplied an essentially free and drinkable material that can be used to store
large amounts of energy at a temperature almost perfect
to meet the comfort needs of people, and our ingenuity can
enable us to do this without raising detrimental environmental issues. Water is indeed an excellent phase change
material for helping solve some of the critical energy storage needs in moving toward a sustainable future.

References
1. Jerman, R. 2019. Chief Engineer, Royal
Realty. Personal Conversation.
2. WoodMackenzie. 2020. "U.S. Energy Storage
Monitor: 2019 Year-In-Review."

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ASHRAE Journal - July 2020

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