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Fair Lawn, N.J. — June 11, 2015 — CALMAC, a leader in energy storage systems, announced that the Alamo Heights Independent School District (AHISD) in San Antonio, Texas, is using its ice-based energy storage technology to cool more than 325,000 square feet across five buildings on its high school campus.
The school district, which was already using several solar systems, a 500 kW solar system, and another five solar arrays totaling 400 kW to help power daily operations, needed a way to reduce energy consumption during expensive peak demand hours. Installing CALMAC’s IceBank tanks at its high school campus has allowed the district to store cheap nighttime energy from the grid in the form of ice that can then be melted to cool buildings during the day. As a result, the district has reduced peak energy consumption by more than 20 percent, despite an increase in square footage and student population.
“The use of CALMAC’s ice-based energy storage tanks has really allowed us to capitalize on the most cost-effective energy from the grid,” said Mike Hagar, assistant superintendent for business and finance at AHISD. “We had heard about energy storage in the past, but the technology has exceeded expectations.”
Renewable energy sources fluctuate based on weather conditions, making technologies like solar systems an unpredictable source when looking to lower energy consumption during peak demand hours. CALMAC’s energy storage supplements solar systems by offering a reliable source for low-cost cooling that can be called into action at any time, as is the case with AHISD. The use of storage technology allows the district to decouple when grid energy is purchased from when it is used. With CALMAC’s system in place, AHISD can store a reserve of energy generated during off-peak hours and use it when there isn’t enough solar power to meet peak consumption.
“This is the first project that I’ve worked on involving a thermal storage system,” said Lowell Tacker, principal with LPA, Inc. and lead in the high school art building’s expansion project. “Given the size and usage of the campus, we felt a thermal storage system appropriate. This assumption was proven without a doubt when we looked at the numbers. We added over 40,000 square feet to the AHISD and the energy costs per square foot have actually gone down considerably. For any project of this scale and usage, there’s no reason not to consider energy storage technology.”
For more information, visit www.calmac.com.
