Ice Energy said that its new Ice Bear residential cooling system has been included in the recently announced White House initiative on scaling renewable energy and storage.
Ice Energy CEO Mike Hopkins said: "Ice Energy is entering the home AC market with a disruptive cooling technology.
Our new product, the Ice Bear 20, will save homeowners money, reduce their carbon footprint and be the next leap forward in transforming the electric grid froman inefficient fossil fuel-dependent system to an efficient renewable-powered system."
The Ice Bear 20 is an ice-based cooling system based on the Ice Bear 30, the company’s highly successful ice battery for commercial and industrial AC systems.
Unlike the Ice Bear 30, however, the Ice Bear 20 is a fully integrated cooling and storage system that replaces a conventional home AC compressor, cooling homes 24/7. It keeps homes cool for 4 hours without using electricity to create cooling, at the times that are most optimal for the grid and homeowner.
Ice batteries solve the challenging grid problem of "peak demand" by reducing the AC load during peak hours – which is the biggest component of the peak demand problem. The solution moves the cooling industry beyond simple energy efficiency standards, to the gold standard of zero peak demand.
The White House noted in a statement announcing a series of federal and private-sector commitments, including the availability of the new residential Ice Bear system said: "President Obama believes in the need to transition to a cleaner, more reliable, and affordable 21st century power grid. Under his leadership, transformations in how we produce and consume electricity are decreasing carbon pollution, scaling up renewable energy, and generating savings on consumer energy bills."
The announcements included new executive actions and 33 state and private sector commitments that will accelerate the grid integration of renewable energy and storage.
Together, they are expected to result in at least 1.3 gigawatts of additional storage procurement or deployment in the next five years. Ice Energy commercial storage solutions also are an excellent fit for many of the announced commitments.