Managing Carbon Emissions

Reducing a Building’s Carbon Footprint

There are a multitude of available technologies for reducing a commercial building’s energy usage and carbon footprint.  A key option is reducing the amount of energy necessary to sustain a building's comfort cooling requirements.  For example, air conditioning represents approximately 10 – 20% of a building's electric load.  By using more efficient technologies for producing comfort cooling, building owners can reduce their electric consumption, which reduces emissions at their source – power plants.  There is also a financial advantage to reducing emissions.  The less electricity you consume; the lower your monthly electric bill.   

Power plants emit CO2 (carbon dioxide) and NOx (nitrogen oxide) and SOx (Sulfur Dioxide) emissions.  By using TAS chilled water technology for comfort cooling, building owners can reduce energy consumption from an approximate 1.6 kW/ton (for well maintained air-cooled units) to .9 kW/ton or better for TAS chilled water systems.  This significant improvement in operating efficiency, almost a 50% improvement as compared to older installed units, means that highly efficient comfort cooling systems use approximately 50% less electricity than conventional air-cooled systems.

Producing Greener / Cleaner Power

In addition to building high efficiency chilled water comfort cooling systems, TAS markets chilled water and air cooled systems to the power generation industry in an application called turbine inlet chilling (TIC).  TIC systems technology is used to make existing gas turbines (simple and combined cycle) more efficient in their operation.  It is used as a power augmentation technology to boost gas turbine MW capacity, especially in geographic climates experiencing high average summer temperatures. 

As an alternative for peak power generation capacity, TIC is more environmentally friendly than other more conventional sources of peak power.  These peak generation resources are normally the least efficient (and most costly to operate) power generation assets as more efficient resources are already employed in servicing both base and intermediate demand.  Consequently, deploying TIC on simple and combined cycle gas turbines should be a first recourse in supplying peak demand as power generators seek to reduce carbon emissions. 

To even further reduce emissions, when comparing installing TIC on a combined cycle gas turbine versus building a new simple cycle peaking plant (without TIC), the TIC system on the host combined cycle plant will produce approximately 50% less CO2 as compared to building a new simple cycle peaking plant.  Economically, and from an environmental perspective, it makes sense to maximize generation output on your most efficient assets.  TIC helps accomplish this goal.   

Carbon Sequestration

A growth market for TAS technology is in carbon sequestration. This technology involves the capture and storage of CO2 from stationary sources.  Carbon sequestration is a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  It complements two other major approaches for greenhouse gas reduction, namely improving energy efficiency and increasing the use of non-carbon energy sources.  Interest has been increasing in carbon sequestration technology, as it is very compatible with the large energy production and delivery infrastructure currently in place.

There are two primary types of carbon sequestration.  The first is capture and storage and the second is enhancing natural processes to increase the removal of carbon from the atmosphere (e.g., forestation).  TAS’ focus is in helping to develop technology that supports the process of capturing, purifying and storing carbon dioxide as a carbon management option.