Industrial Cooling: Turning Wasted Pressure into Working Power

The 3-Year Payback Hiding in Your Facility’s Cooling System

If you manage an industrial facility, you are in the business of heat management. Whether you’re overseeing a data center, a manufacturing plant, or a chemical processing site, your cooling towers are likely your biggest "silent" expense.

You’ve probably already optimized your VFDs and cleaned your heat exchangers. But there is one energy leak that almost every Operations Manager overlooks: The Pressure Reducing Valve (PRV) on your makeup water line.

The "Hidden" Power Plant

High-volume cooling towers require a constant stream of makeup water—often 500 GPM or more. This water usually enters your facility at a much higher pressure than your system requires.

Standard engineering practice is to install a PRV to "knock down" that pressure. But here’s the truth: A PRV is an energy thief. It takes the kinetic energy you’ve already paid for and wastes it, turning it into useless heat and friction.

The Math of Recovery

At Tap Energy, we don’t waste that pressure; we harvest it. By replacing or bypassing that valve with a micro-hydro turbine, you turn a point of waste into a point of production.

For a typical industrial line, the numbers speak for themselves:

• The Flow: 500 GPM makeup water.

• The "Waste": 15 psi of excess pressure.

• The Result: ~ 8,600 kWh of clean, behind-the-meter energy generated every year.

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Between the direct energy savings and the 30% Federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC), most facilities see a full ROI in under 3 years.

Engineered for Uptime

We know that in your world, "sustainability" cannot come at the expense of "reliability."

Our energy recovery systems can also include an automated or manual redundant bypass. If the turbine requires maintenance, the water flow is never interrupted. Your cooling process stays online, your temperatures stay stable, and your facility keeps running.

Is Your System an Untapped Asset?

If you are moving water, you are moving energy. The question is whether you’re throwing that energy away at a valve or putting it back into your grid.

We’ve developed a Pressure Potential Assessment to help Operations Directors quantify exactly how much "hidden" power is sitting in their pipes.

Ready to see how much energy is hiding in your pipes? Stop wasting pressure. Learn more about our energy recovery solutions at www.tapenergy.eco or contact us to discuss becoming a Pioneer Partner for our 2026 pilot program.