Sustainable cooling

Cooling is critical for health, prosperity, and the environment. It keeps our vaccines safe and food fresh, ensures we have comfortable buildings to live and work in, and is central to our industrial and transport infrastructure. However, cooling is typically energy intensive and highly polluting due to the emissions from the electricity that powers this equipment and the refrigerants and insulation foam gas used in it.

Cooling accounts for more than 7% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and these emissions are increasing rapidly. We urgently need to cut these emissions and meet increasing demand for future cooling sustainably.

We provide independent advice and expertise to governments, cities, foundations, development banks and corporates as they seek to balance the need to reduce the environmental impact of cooling activities while meeting increasing demand for cooling. Our work ranges from strategy and policy advice to large scale finance and district cooling initiatives.

Net Zero cooling strategy and action planning

We deliver cooling strategy and action planning advice to a range of organisations around the world. For example, we led the first global strategy, modelling and action planning work on how to get to zero greenhouse gas emissions on cooling in collaboration with the COP Champions team, Cool Coalition, Oxford University and Clean Cooling Collaborative.

Programme advice and delivery

We advise on, design and run large sustainable cooling initiatives with a range of organisations globally. For example, we partnered with the Clean Cooling Collaborative to design and deliver their $10m cooling efficiency finance window covering Asia, Africa and Latin America and developed a range of knowledge products and thought leadership reports (e.g. on cooling-as-a-service and Net Zero cold chains).

District cooling

We advise on a range of district cooling projects. For example, we were appointed to undertake district cooling pre-feasibility studies to understand the potential for district cooling in two locations within the city of Thane as part of the UN Environment District Energy in Cities Initiative.

Corporate and policy advice

We provide independent advice to corporates and policymakers on cooling. For example, we provided impartial findings to European Fluoro Carbon Technical Committee members, the European Commission, and other government bodies including an assessment of the F-gases regulation quota allocation mechanism and its impact on F-gases regulated markets.

Strategic planning and project development

A transformational change to the traditional approach to cooling buildings is needed to achieve Net Zero. Our experts understand the need and drivers for balancing the cooling and heating needs within buildings and across estates, taking the starting points for a Net Zero strategy as minimizing mechanical cooling and heating demand requirements. We provide practical guidance on integrated approaches to cooling and heating that help buildings and estates use energy intelligently such as smart metering, energy generation, renewable energies, peak demand, thermal energy storage and load shifting coupled to simple to implement practices on which procurement policies can be based to reflect return on investment in energy, whole life cycle analysis and awareness of circular economy.

We engage multi-disciplinary teams from across the Carbon Trust to produce system‐based approaches to cooling that are designed for efficiency as a key objective while including reliability, safety, reuse/re-manufacture or recycle of system and components together with choice of refrigerant for ongoing best system performance throughout the life of the system/building including retrofitting integrated cooling and heating into existing buildings.