New cooling and emergency power unit

The Max Planck campus in Martinsried near Munich was built in the early 1970s. Since that time, the Institute had extracted approx. 2 megawatts cooling energy from the tertiary groundwater. In 2012, the water authority prohibited the Institute the continued use of tertiary groundwater. As an alternative, the Institute built a cooling and emergency power unit on its premises which, upon completion, was to supply the entire Max Planck campus with 7 megawatts of cooling energy.

The central part of the cooling unit is a compressor in the basement as well as a cooler generating 6 volts in the rooftop plant room. On the ground floor, there are transformer rooms as well as a plant room for the medium voltage system.

For the purpose of reducing energy consumption, on the entire campus rainwater is collected and stored in two cisterns. There, the water is cooled again by the ground temperature and used as a flow for the cooling circuit. There is an area on the ground floor that was to be equipped with block-type thermal power stations. The planning included power units with two times 1 megawatt.