- Air conditioning is already a crucial technology for development in warm climates
- Cooling will become ever more important as global warming drives demand
- The additional resources used for cooling are likely to exacerbate global warming
- Coolar aims to deliver a more resource and energy-efficient solution to mitigate this
More and more people turn to air conditioning for relief as climate change drives temperature increases and life-threatening heat waves become more frequent around the globe. Unfortunately, the technology that is currently used for providing this relief is a double-edged sword. In the industrial economies of North America and Europe, the heating of buildings in winter accounts for the biggest share of energy use and carbon emissions that drive global warming. As more countries with warmer climates grow economically, the same is increasingly the case for energy use and carbon emissions linked to air conditioning for indoor comfort and refuge from the heat as well as various commercial applications.Over the past 20 years, energy used for space cooling has roughly doubled according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Unless there is an effective push into more sustainable cooling technologies, it is projected to almost double again over the next ten years and will continue to grow beyond that.
The IEA predicts that until 2050 the number of air conditioning units in private households will increase to 5.6 bn units from 1.6 bn units currently. The amount of energy required to run the additional 4 bn units is expected to be equivalent to the current annual energy consumption of the USA, EU and Japan combined (IEA, 2018), implying a devastating environmental burden in terms of CO2e emissions from additional energy consumption. This surge in air conditioning usage not only increases energy consumption but also raises concerns about the environmental impact of refrigerants used in these systems. Many current air conditioning units still use hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which have a potential of adding to global warming by thousands of times more than CO2. The release of these refrigerants, through leaks or improper disposal, can make climate change even worse.
This is why Coolar is expanding the use of its sorption technology into air conditioning. From spring 2024, the team has started to develop a hybrid air conditioning system that features a sorption circuit driven by waste heat. By utilising otherwise wasted thermal energy and focusing on sustainable refrigerants like water – as used in Coolar’s previous innovations – this design addresses the two critical environmental concerns in the space cooling industry: energy efficiency and the use of harmful refrigerants. With this approach, Coolar has won the support of Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB) via its Programme for Research, Innovation & Technology (IBB Pro FIT), co-financing by the European Union, and private investors. Over the coming months, Coolar plans to refine this technology further and implement it in a pilot aiming to validate its effectiveness in real-world conditions.
The challenge ahead lies in balancing the essential need for space cooling with our responsibility to protect the planet, making technologies like Coolar’s a potential game-changer in the fight against climate change.
Authors:
Markus Wiehl
Christoph Goeller
