Page 99 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

The reason we exist
Peterson chillers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, just south of San Francisco.
through those coils. At 32°F, that liquid produces a thick crust of ice on the outside of the pipes. During the day, the warm water returning from the buildings on the loop melts the ice and cools the water, which gets pumped back out to the various buildings for air-conditioning and process cooling.”
The new system not only met the EPA’s stringent requirements but also netted five hundred thousand dollars in annual savings in their utility bill. “Those chillers used to run 24/7 before the new coil and ice technology was implemented,” explains Young. “With the new system, they only use the chillers at night, during off-peak hours, to build up the ice. During the day, all they need is a pump to circulate the water throughout the cam- pus, which saves energy by not running electric chillers during the peak electrical period of the day.”
2006 HEAT WAVE
Much of Stanford’s construction over the past thirty years has been driven by seismic retrofits and energy-ef- ficiency, funded by the alumni. In 2005–06, Stanford was in yet another expansion phase. August 2006 was a time of record temperatures and humidity for the entire West Coast. “It was so hot it was just miserable,” recalls Young, whose daughter attended Stanford at the time. “Stanford did not have enough chilling capacity for the five new buildings going online plus all its servers. The extreme heat degraded the capacity of their existing equipment by about 20 percent. And all our equipment was out because of the heat wave.” It was the makings of a first-class emergency.
Young was told by several people—on the down-low—that they were getting close to evacuating Stanford Medical Center and shutting down all their servers. “They were worried that word would leak out to the news
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