Bank Puts Air Conditioning Costs On Ice

In the basement of investment bank Credit Suisse, an old-fashioned idea is breathing new life into air conditioning. Giant blocks of ice keep the Manhattan skyscraper cool. CBS News correspondent Bianca Solorzano reports.

"It's extremely energy efficient," says Credit Suisse engineer William Beck.

At the heart of the system: 64 tanks holding 5,000 gallons of water. The water is frozen in these tanks overnight when energy demands are low and electricity is at its cheapest. The ice melts during the day and helps make cold air that eventually circulates throughout the building.

Although traditional air conditioning supplements the system during peak demand, the ice still shaves $1 million a year off Credit Suisse's electricity bill.

"We had almost like a three dimensional win on this," says Beck. "One was the energy cost savings, the other was energy savings and the third was operational efficiency."

What's old is new again. A doctor in Apalachicola, Fla., built an ice making machine in the 1830s. It basically blew air over a bucket of ice, cooling hospital rooms full of patients suffering from malaria. Thousands of ice-based systems are still used around the world.

"The applications range anywhere from small school systems to large commercial buildings," says Todd Coulard, general manager of Trane Energy.

But Credit Suisse's is one of the biggest.

Within a year, a similar system may be available for your own home. A $10,000 residential version is being tried out in Colorado, Arizona and California. It could end up being one of the coolest ways to beat the heat.

[donnie900]

I don't wanna scare anybody here but, hydrogen combustion needs this pink gup fuel that bundles up hydrogen molecules in tightly packed larger molecules that are non-combustable, and then its fed to the carbarator where it hooks up with a catalyst that chemically reacts with the pink gup releasing the hydrogen. But the scary part is: The car poops again. See.. the catalyst that chemically reacts with the pink gup to release the hydrogen shyyts out hockey pucks.

[lwhiway]

Sheep will always follow the Shepard, with or without a dog.

[dukeudevil]

Cool. (Pun intended.)

[figuy30]

What gets me is why we got away from this in the first place. We used to have ice boxes, then we had electric refrigerators. We used to have electric powered cars, then gas powered cars. I'm sure the technology would have been extremely advanced by now if only we had gone forward. Big business, as usual,(Standard Oil, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler) and a host of others made sure America had other options even to the point of discouraging research in a cleaner more affordable way of life all for the sake of profit. Now that we've "discovered" ice maybe we can get back to seriously re-discovering "other sources" of power and convenience to help reduce our dependence on the rest of the world and make America a cleaner, safer place for future generations, and in the process maybe even re-discover ourselves.