By BEX Staff for AZBEX
Cordia Energy is planning to add a fourth water chilling and circulation plant to serve its downtown Phoenix customer base.
The proposed plant will sit on 2.67 gross acres at the NWC of 6th and McKinley streets, with a building footprint of 12,136SF. Other media outlets reported last week that the plant was to be a huge development and built underground, neither of which is correct.
Cordia’s three downtown Phoenix plants comprise a chilled water system capable of providing more than 27,000 tons of cooling and storing 100,000 ton-hours of ice for additional cooling. The plants use electric chillers to maintain a supply of cold water to individual buildings’ cooling systems via an underground pipe network.
After extracting the heat from the buildings’ HVAC systems, the warm water is then pumped back to Cordia’s plants to start the process of cooling the water over again. Some of the water is produced into ice overnight—when the system demands are low—and stored in ice storage tanks. This ice can then be melted during the hottest hours of the day to meet the high demand for air conditioning.
Design plans for a fourth standalone plant are underway that will add another 10,000 tons of refrigeration to serve the University of Arizona’s medical campus area downtown. The plant is expected to cost between $40M and $50M to develop.
According to materials on file with the City of Phoenix, Cordia is the project owner and Deutsch Architecture Group is the design firm. The landscape architect is G.K. Flannigan Associates, and Dibble is the civil engineer. The company plans to submit preliminary site plans this week, and a request for proposals is expected soon to start the general contractor selection process.
