Toronto pulls freezing cold water from the bottom of the lake to cool buildings, lower carbon emissions, save on power costs, and source drinking wate

This looks like an interesting energy project being opened in Toronto. Enwave Systems has built a three pipe system that pulls low-temperature water from the bottom of the lake Ontario, extracts the coldness from the water (the process is not mentioned), and then puts the water into the drinking supply.

I would be interested to know the net effects of this system since they obviously still have to have a large pumping station running anyway in order to pull the water in.  Some of the benefits that are listed on the Enwave site are:

▪     Uses 75% less energy than conventional chillers
▪     Eliminates more than 59 megawatts from Ontario’s electricity grid
▪     Removes 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air – equivalent to taking 8000 cars off the road
▪     Reduces ozone depleting refrigerants (CFC’s and HCFC’s) [by how much???]

It’s an interesting project. I look forward to reading more on the actual implementation and real-world results.

There is a photo gallery of the construction process here.