Often someone comes to me all excited about the latest thing in energy efficiency and they’re hoping I’ve never heard of it before.  Why you may ask?  I guess it is a sense of accomplishment to be able to stump the environmental guy.  Very seldom does it turn out that they found something new but rather something old given a new catchy name.  However sometimes these situations make you rethink the old, and get you motivated to try something different.

I had one of these the other day.  The above average snow fall this winter prompted this person to tell me about this great new energy savings system that utilizes snow storage.  There is plenty of potential with snow storage so I was eager to hear about this new system.  The person went on to explain that this new system is called “Cool Energy” and it involved snow storage next to buildings but that is all they knew about it.  Where do I even begin?  Try searching for “Cool Energy” in Google or Bing and see how many different products you get.  The next problem is the description of the system.  What exactly do they mean by snow storage next to a building? 

After further discussion with this person and some digging, I came up with three possible links to this “Cool Energy”.

First is actually more commonly referred to as the “Igloo Principle” than “Cool Energy”.  The “Igloo Principle” pretty much describes itself.  You pile snow around a building so the insulating affects of the snow lowers your heating costs.  Unless you know what you’re doing I wouldn’t recommend trying this approach.  There are many factors you have to consider when the snow melts in the spring and you don’t want water running into your building (home).  However if done right you will notice savings on your heating costs.

Second is a company called Cool Energy Inc.  Their technology is interesting and has merit but I don’t see any relation to snow storage as it was described to me.

The third and probably most probable correlation is an article from Japan (www.hkd.meti.go.jp/hokne/c_energy4e/ce4_e.pdf).  The name of the article is Cool Energy but it contains case examples of the utilization of snow and ice cryogenic energy.  It is a good read for anyone interested in what can be done with large amounts of snow including the first point mentioned here. 

Let me step back for a moment and explain that the last few years I’ve worked on trying to melt large amounts after the winter.  Some cities are left with huge mountains of snow that don’t melt away by the end of the summer.  In these cases, some storage sites have been built next in areas where excess heat is a by product and this is used to melt the snow.  After reading the article it got me thinking about some up coming LEED Gold projects might make good use of this approach since they are located in a large storage yards.  A system could be constructed similar to the one mentioned for the Snow Science Museum.

If anyone else has had experience with using snow storage, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll share any success I might have with getting one of these systems built.