Performance evaluation of district cooling plant with ice storage

District cooling system (DCS) is a massive cooling energy production scheme that serves a group of buildings. The system performance can often be improved by the incorporation of a cool-storage system, in that part of the cooling demand is shifted from peak hours to non-peak hours. This brings mutual benefits to the power supplier and the consumers. In order to evaluate the energy performance and cost effectiveness of such an integrated technology, a feasible district cooling plus ice-storage system was developed for a hypothetical site in Hong Kong. A parametric study making use of the DOE-2 and TRNSYS simulation software was conducted to evaluate the system performance at different partial storage capacities, control strategies, and tariff structures. Other than the basic design factors, the results from 27 cases showed the importance of the tariff structure, the capital and electricity costs in this issue.