Along the lines of little-discussed but concrete line-item manifestations of climate change expenses:
I’ve now heard of several facilities with cooling towers which struggle to keep up with their loads during times of peak temp/humidity in the summer. For instance,
Rogers said there are strong indications that increasing the water’s flow rate at the cooling towers can increase the operating efficiency under stressful environmental conditions including high wet bulb (the temperature air would have if it were cooled to the saturation point).
In some ways this is unsurprising - a cooling tower is a big infrastructure investment and facilities of all kind naturally push to upgrade, expand, increasing heat loads. On the other hand, big capital investments are usually modelled to account for upgrades, and so a widespread problem suggests that the assumptions and projections that went into the sizing of these units are slightly invalid.
And indeed,
This is despite
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2018.07.080 (which is talking about natural convection towers):
