Beverly Hills hotels use icy energy saving solution

Fancy hotels in Beverly Hills are trying to put a freeze on high energy costs and help save the planet in the process.

The Waldorf Astoria and Beverly Hilton are using a new system that uses ice to cut cooling costs—150,000 pounds of frozen water, to be exact.

"Through daytime you have great clean electricity ... [but] when the sunset comes the electricity becomes very dirty," explained Yaron Ben Nun, CTO of Nostromo , a startup that's helping commercial building reduce their energy use and carbon footprint through a novel thermal energy solution.

It uses a modular bank of ice packs to store energy during the day and slowly release it in the afternoon as it melts. The system helps keep buildings cool even when electricity is at its peak.

"Thermal energy cooling or thermal energy storage is not new but what drew us to Nostromo was the fact that they developed a new way to do it," explained David Alagem, who runs technology at Alagem Capital Group. They are the real estate investment firm that helped re-develop both hotels.

"You come into a building and you don't have a space to put something big but they've developed something where you come in in pieces so whether it's in a basement on the roof of a high-rise, you can come in bring in their pieces build it you know scale it to your building and then allow yourself to have a thermal energy storage solution when maybe you couldn't do that before," explained Alagem.

Ben Nun showed me a computer screen with a graph displaying the hotel's energy consumption. You can see a dramatic drop in their energy usage as Nostromo's system kicks in in the afternoon hours.

He considers the system safer than alternatives like giant lithium-ion batteries that store energy and more convenient than solar panels, which might not be able to go on every rooftop.

"Being a part of bringing solutions to humanity, this is a great privilege," said Ben Nun.

Nostromo's system at the Beverly Bills property serves as a proof of concept, encouraging other businesses to do the same. The company recently secured a $189 million loan from the government to help expand its system to more than 100 California buildings.

"We want to be a model. You know, we're not required to do these things but we want to show other developers you should be doing these things because we all need to do our part," concluded Alagem.