Ice, Ice, Baby….
You won’t believe what I was standing in yesterday! I actually walked through an ice tank that holds 1.1 million gallons of water (yes that’s million). A team of us walked right through the tank on a catwalk during a tour of Northwind Phoenix, but let me start at the beginning.
Northwind Phoenix is a plant that basically makes ice. So what, you say? Ice is no big thing. You do it in your freezer every day, right? Wrong! This plant makes lots and lots of ice. About 3 – 5 million pounds of ice per night during peak seasons. No, not the kind of ice for drinks (that would be a lot of drinks!). This ice is used to cool the Chase Ballpark and 25 other buildings in the downtown area. This process is critical to keeping the energy usage and costs down for cooling something so large with over 48,000 people in it.
For those who haven’t heard or experienced it, Phoenix gets hot. Really, really, hot. Temperatures have been known to reach over 120° in the worst of the summer. This is when baseball is in its prime and people are flocking to the stadiums to see the Arizona Diamondbacks. Would any of those people be willing to come if the temperatures inside of the ballpark were over 120°? Even 100° or 90° would be pretty uncomfortable and people would likely stay at home and watch it from their cool houses. Not only that, but high heat exposure can cause medical problems and dehydration. The players wouldn’t even be willing to play in those conditions. Cooling is critical.
We aren’t just talking baseball though. This plant also cools the 4th Ave. County Jail and over 20 other office and condominium buildings downtown. It is safe to say that Phoenix has become the populated city it is now as a result of the advances in air conditioning and refrigeration. Northwind takes it a step further to achieve the maximum cooling possible with as little energy as necessary.
They have done this so well that another plant is being installed up the road to cool the new Phoenix Civic Center and other structures. This new plant will be twice the size of the existing plant and is so efficient that the Civic Center won’t even have its own cooling towers. All of the cooling will be generated from the Northwind plant where ice cold water is put through heat exchangers, a process to remove heat from water to cool it (no you don’t cool the water, you remove the heat - you learn this early on at RSI) and run back in through piping to cool the building.
This new area houses the ice tank we got to walk through. We also got to see the new chiller areas going in and the new heat exchangers. As if that wasn’t interesting enough, think of all this massive equipment, millions of gallons of water, thousands of tons of ice, all monitored by a hand full of computers and 8 or 10 screens. When necessary, it can all be monitored through one laptop computer with an internet connection.
There must be engineers there with major degrees and 20 years or more of experience right? Wrong again. While we were there we met a 1991 RSI graduate and here’s what he emailed us today:Thank you Rick it was a pleasure to see you all, also I know it’s hard to keep track on former students. I want to thank you and RSI for paving the way on my career which is now here at NORTHWIND PHX. I hope you enjoyed the tour of our facilities and please feel free to visit us anytime. Paul Lopez
In fact, while we were there a 2007 RSI graduate with just a couple of years of A/C installation experience was interviewing for a job.
He got it.
