CU-Boulder awarded $3M grant to develop power-plant cooling technology

BOULDER — The University of Colorado Boulder has received a $3 million federal grant to develop cooling technology that could enable efficient, low-cost supplementary cooling for thermos-electric power plants.

The grant spans three years and is from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

The CU-Boulder research team, led by Ronggui Yang, associate professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering and Applied Science, will develop cold storage modules and a system called RadiCold that cools by infrared thermal emission to enable efficient, low-cost supplementary cooling for thermoelectric power generation.

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If successful, CU-Boulder’s design could provide power-plant operators a low-cost way to supplement cooling without using as much water as they do now.

Thermo-electric power plants are among the biggest consumers of fresh water in the world, according to a statement released by CU. Forty-one percent of total fresh water withdrawal — about 139 billion gallons per day — is used to cool condenser water. Three percent of the cooling water is evaporated and lost. This has an enormous environmental impact, especially in areas already suffering from fresh-water shortages. These systems also release heat waste into the environment, which adversely affects wildlife, said Marta Zgagacz, of CU’s Office of Technology Transfer and part of the team that will evaluate the commercialization potential of the technology.