The Impact of Using Chilled Water Storage Systems on the Performance of Air Cooled Chillers

In the air conditioning (AC) industry chilled water storage (CWS) systems are one form of cool thermal storage technology that can be used to time shift the electrical load of the system from the peak day periods to off peak night time periods. In this paper the data for the actual exported and generated electrical energy obtained for the power stations has been used to estimate the electrical energy consumption and the peak electrical load of AC systems. Since the chiller in an air cooled AC system represent more than 75% of the total electrical power consumed by an AC system during the peak demand period, the impact of using CWS systems with alternative operating strategies including partial (load leveling ), partial (demand limiting) and full load has been investigated. In our conclusions we estimate that approximately 45% of the total annual exported electrical energy is consumed solely by AC systems as a result of the very high ambient temperatures. Furthermore, it is estimated AC systems represent about 62% of the peak electrical load. The results demonstrate that CWS can reduce the peak electrical load of a chiller in an air cooled AC system by up to 100% and reduce the nominal chiller size by up to 33% depending up on the operating strategy adopted. This is achieved with only a 4% increase in power consumption of the chiller for all CWS strategies except for full storage where the energy consumption actually decreases by approximately 4%.