Stanford's Ice Plant – Interesting Facts

• The Ice Plant builds and stores ice at night to provide campus air conditioning the following day. This approach allows Stanford to take advantage of inexpensive nighttime electrical rates, and avoid expensive daytime electrical demand charges.
• 120,000 ton-hours of ice can be stored. This is the equivalent of:
  • 120,000 window air conditioners operating for 1 hour
  • Enough cooling for about 2,000 single-family homes on a hot summer day
  • 10,000,000 pounds of ice
  • 160,000,000 ice cubes
• The ice is built and stored on 360 miles of 1” steel tubing in a 4,000,000 gallon tank located under the Jordan Quad parking lot.
• This is the third largest ice storage facility in the world.
• The plant has five 2,500 ton screw compressor chillers.
• Each chiller has a 2,250 H.P. motor operating at 12,000 volts.
• Each chiller uses 3,400 pounds of environmentally friendly anhydrous ammonia as a refrigerant.
• Cooling energy is transferred with a 25% ethylene glycol / water mixture much like the antifreeze used in automobiles. 200,000 gallons are required to fill the system.
• The Ice Plant is 100% computer controlled and operated remotely. The plant is inspected once every eight hours.
• Stanford's current average peak electrical demand is 30 megawatts, the equivalent of about 15,000 single-family homes.
• Ice storage technology saves Stanford about 8 megawatts of peak electrical demand and 6 megawatts of average summer daytime load over a conventional cooling system.