Hot town, summer in the city. And while the back of my neck isn't getting dirty and gritty, as '60s pop-rockers the Lovin' Spoonful would have it, my collar is often unpleasantly damp. Summer is still in its infancy, and the mercury already routinely cracks 90. And the forecast for the next two months? Hazy, hot, humid . . . horrible. What better time to visit Comfort Link, a downtown company whose slogan is "Making Baltimore a Cooler Place," and whose methodology involves the daily production of some 6 million pounds of ice.
Comfort Link President Stanley Gent greets me at the door of a company facility at 7 S. Gay St. (right around the corner from the Block, if that helps you place the address). There's a hint of Irish brogue in the bearded 51-year-old's voice. (He was born in what he dubs "sunny Belfast," where his shipwright grandfather helped build the Titanic.) But any serious interviewing has to wait while Gent ushers me through a huge room rife with pipes and mechanical apparatus emitting a mind-numbing cacophony. I've essentially stepped inside the works of a mammoth air conditioner. Comfort Link engages in what's called "district cooling," a growing urban trend wherein centralized plants provide cooling services for large numbers of buildings.
"We make chilled water at central locations and pipe the chilled water to other locations for cooling," Gent says, once we reach the quiet of a conference room. "That's essentially what a district cooling system is."
It's sort of a summertime twist on an old concept. Centralized systems have been providing steam to heat Baltimore buildings for more than 100 years. Comfort Link was launched in 1995, but other U.S. cities have been using the district-cooling concept since the 1960s. In addition to the Gay Street plant (which came online last December), the company operates plants at the corner of Eutaw and Saratoga streets and at the Convention Center. Gent shows me a map of his more than 25 cooling clients, among them the University of Maryland Medical System, Harborplace, the National Aquarium, and the Central Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. All told, Comfort Link is responsible for chilling out some 10 million square feet of downtown Baltimore.
The real trick of district cooling is its ability to take advantage of fluctuations in the price of electricity (which is what powers the plants to chill and pump the water). In a company control room, one computer screen charts the hourly price of electricity, which rises and falls precipitously with demand. A kilowatt-hour of juice that costs 2 cents at midnight (when demand is low), might cost 8 cents at high-demand noon. This is why Gent goes into the ice business at night, when he makes enough frozen water to, er, sink the Titanic.
"We build ice when the price of electricity is down," he says. "We can store it and use it [to chill water] when the price for electricity might be four times as much."
Hearing about these millions of pounds of ice, my heat-sogged brain envisions the world's largest gin and tonic. (Did I mention my house is not air-conditioned?) But it's not like that. Comfort Link doesn't make cute little cubes; indeed, you can't even see the ice. It's made in vast closed tanks, such as the pair Gent shows me at the Eutaw Street plant, each 54 feet high and 31 feet in diameter. The tanks are honeycombed with pipes containing a coolant not unlike the antifreeze in your car. At night they are filled with water, the coolant is chilled to below freezing (via machinery running on the cheaper electricity), and several inches of ice eventually forms on the pipes. When another steamy day dawns and office workers rush to their thermostats for relief, Comfort Link simply starts pumping water through the icy tanks and into their client's buildings, where ventilating systems force air over the chilled pipes to create a comforting, cool breeze.
While Gent calls it "the latest technology for cooling," in a sense it's pretty old school. While mechanical air-conditioning as we know it turns 100 this year (Willis Carrier is credited with developing the first working system in 1902), the technology didn't begin to take hold until the 1930s. (A 1935 Baltimore Gas & Electric pamphlet I ran across at the Pratt touts that a whopping 173 air conditioners were in service citywide.) In the interim, some businesses developed rudimentary cooling systems employing ice. I've read accounts of how certain Baltimore movie theaters would haul in blocks of ice and simply run fans over them to cool popcorn-munching patrons. The Mitchell Courthouse, I've been told, once used an ice-and-fan system as well.
Today's ice cooling is all high-tech and computer-driven, but it doesn't do me any good. Gent says district cooling is geared toward large buildings and commercial applications. In other words, they aren't going to run a chilly water pipe into my muggy rowhouse anytime soon.
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