>>6555274

"..20 million gallons a day… then pumping the water back into the river up to 35 degrees hotter."

That doesn't sound right.

20,000,000gal/day x 3.785kg/gal x 4186J/degC/kg x 19.4C-degrees = 6.148 terajoules per day

6.148TJ/day / 86400seconds/day = 71.15 megawatts continuously.

Even with an impressive coefficient of performance in the heat pumps… that sounds like an awful lot of power. It sounds like they might be licensed to dump that much heat into the water, but only use a fraction of that capacity, and the author of this hit piece doesn't know what they're writing about.

>>6555557

Well, they're not using that much electricity. 71MW is the heat rejection. The amount of heat that they need to reject is the amount of energy the building soaks up from that sun + the amount of electricity used and converted into heat by light, computers, appliances, etc + the electricity needed to pump that heat into the cooling water. The very low temperature difference between the building and the water (possibly negative) means that the HVAC systems can run at fantastic efficiency and use very much electricity than if they were trying to pump that heat into the air on a hot day.

You're right. That single building is not using that much power. But what I was thinking about is the amount of solar energy that lands on that footprint during that day. Most of it is going to be reflected by the glass. And some of it soaks into the building to keep it warm at night. I can't imagine that they'd still need to dump 70 megawatts after all that.

>>6555725

*and use very much less electricity