The Chinese bus company couldn’t work it out. Some days when its buses merely crawled along Shanghai’s streets, their power consumption would go through the roof. The reason why was a mystery. So, a team from the US firm Montana Technologies flew out to investigate. They started clamping electricity meters onto parts of the bus and soon realized what Yutong Bus, the Chinese company in question, had missed.
To get around this issue, Nostromo has created a system called IceBrick, which it installed last year at two adjacent hotels in California: the Beverly Hilton and the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills. The IceBrick, a rectangular module, sits on the roof of a building. It contains nearly 200 insulated capsules of water that can be frozen when off-peak energy is available.