Carbon and Water Footprint of Energy Saving Options for the Air Conditioning of Electric Cabins at Industrial Sites

Modern electric and electronic equipment in energy-intensive industries, including electric steelmaking plants, are often housed in outdoor cabins. In a similar manner as data centres, such installations must be air conditioned to remove excess heat and to avoid damage to electric components. Cooling systems generally display a water–energy nexus behaviour, mainly depending on associated heat dissipation systems. Hence, it is desirable to identify configurations achieving both water and energy savings for such installations. This paper compares two alternative energy-saving configurations for air conditioning electric cabins at steelmaking sites—that is, an absorption cooling based system exploiting industrial waste heat, and an airside free-cooling-based system—against the traditional configuration. All systems were combined with either dry coolers or cooling towers for heat dissipation. We calculated water and carbon footprint indicators, primary energy demand and economic indicators by building a TRNSYS simulation model of the systems and applying it to 16 worldwide ASHRAE climate zones. In nearly all conditions, waste-heat recovery-based solutions were found to outperform both the baseline and the proposed free-cooling solution regarding energy demand and carbon footprint. When cooling towers were used, free cooling was a better option in terms water footprint in cold climates.