Cooling towers in commercial buildings
Release date: November 14, 2024
In 2018, an estimated 3% of commercial buildings, representing 17% of commercial floorspace, had cooling towers, according to the 2018 Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS). Cooling towers, which discard unwanted heat from air-conditioning equipment, were more prevalent among large buildings than small buildings. About 43% of buildings larger than 200,000 square feet had a cooling tower, compared with only about 3% of buildings 200,000 square feet or smaller.
In the 2018 CBECS, when the building respondent reported packaged air-conditioning units, chillers, or heat pumps as part of the building’s air-conditioning equipment, we asked, “Does this building have a cooling tower for the cooling equipment?” We did not tabulate cooling tower information in our published data tables or include the variable on the public use microdata file. We suppressed the cooling tower variable from the microdata to protect the identity of individual buildings because cooling towers can be an outwardly visible feature.
The following table presents the number of buildings and the amount of floorspace with cooling towers by various building characteristics.