Mississauga Arena Doing Its Part to Conserve Energy

Mississauga | Ontario | Lifestyle |

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Published February 23, 2017 at 4:26 am

hershey_centre_-_interior

At a time when energy conservation is top of mind for so many people and organizations, it’s encouraging to see popular public facilities do their part to be as green as possible.

The city of Mississauga recently announced that the city took on a challenge to optimize energy consumption and reduce the overall carbon footprint of some of the highest energy consuming facilities in the municipality–ice rinks.

Recently, the city conducted a Refrigeration Plant Optimization pilot project at Iceland Arena that successfully reduced weekly electricity consumption of the ice-making equipment by 22 per cent and electrical demand by 158 kW. This resulted in estimated weekly savings of $1,462 (or $38,000 annually) with no change in ice quality.

The city provided some interesting facts about the pilot program at Iceland Arena:

  • Forming and maintaining a good skating surface is not as simple as turning on the backyard hose
  • The Iceland facility is expected to maintain an 80’x180’ ice block to depths of 1 ½” – 1 ¾” frozen in all conditions
  • Besides consuming a significant amount of energy, maintaining good ice quality requires sound ice-making equipment that have complex controls
  • The city owns 13 ice rinks consuming a significant amount of energy.
  • The city’s energy management team identified the ice plants as great candidates for energy conservation. They created an Ice Rink Energy Efficiency Task Force in the summer of 2016, with a goal to implement ice plant operation best practices to optimize energy consumption and reduce the overall carbon footprint of the city’s Ice Rinks.

According to the city, energy consumption in ice rinks can be decreased by reducing the refrigeration loads through various energy retrofits and reducing equipment operational losses. In order to better optimize rinks, the team targeted ice surface temperatures, hot water resurfacing temperatures and volumes and more. 

“Along with cost savings and significantly reduced energy consumption, the results also included much smoother equipment operation,with equipment cycling almost eliminated, leading to reduced wear and tear, thus extending equipment lifetime,” the city release reads.

The case study basically revealed–and this should come as relief to anyone worried about the city’s carbon footprint–that it’s possible to reduce energy waste while maintaining ice quality.

As a result of the project, the Hershey Centre has volunteered to be the next facility to optimize its equipment operation.

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