Scalability of carbon-neutral cooling system

Abstract

The scalability of a carbon neutral cooling system to provide the MIT campus its annual cooling needs was assessed. The cooling system under observation requires 400 W of electricity mainly to power unidirectional fans that propel air through the chambers and 1423.88 W of hot water to raise the temperature of the airflow in the regenerative cycle. The results of the theoretical energy calculations, based on the annual cooling needs and energy consumption of MIT in the 2017 fiscal year, determined that there is not enough excess hot water supplied by the natural gas utilized by the power plant on campus in order to fully operate enough system units to contribute adequate cooling. MIT requires 207,679,950.191 kWh of energy of cooling annually with an excess of 211 kWh of excess hot water, which is not enough to power the required 101,839 system units necessary to provide total campus cooling, which is 8.45 x 10⁷ kWh of energy. Evacuated tube solar collectors across an area of 181 m² may be able to bridge the thermal energy gap assuming 800 W/m² at 65% efficiency.