Birmingham, United Kingdom, 11 June 2018: “Cooling is at the heart of safety, resilience and economic advancement of society,” said Toby Peters, Professor in Cold Economy at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. “It materially impacts our lives on land and at sea. It is essential to address major challenges around access to food and medicine, addressing subsistence farming and rural poverty, delivering sustainable, resilient and safe cities, managing energy and natural resources including water, and protecting our environment.” It was against this backdrop, he said, that the Clean Cooling Congress, held from April 18 to 19, 2018, was designed to create a dialogue and enable strategic government understanding and adoption of the agenda. Sharing key takeaways from the workshops, Peters said the recommendations included the development of living labs, a centre of excellence and greater emphasis on system-level design.

Living labs, he said, fill the critical gap in understanding, designing and deploying multi-sector, multi-technology, multi-energy source integrated approaches to cooling, to deliver and balance maximum economic, environmental and societal impact. A centre of excellence, Peters said, would create an international coalition of partners including technology innovators and stakeholders from the academic, public, financiers, for-profit and not-for-profit sectors working together to accelerate new science through demonstration, validation and manufacture to accelerate delivery of workable products into the global market.

Finally, Peters said, with regard to advocating system-level design and harnessing waste and renewable energy sources, it is important to bring together technology and systems innovation into “a cross-sector, needs-driven systems approach for specific markets harnessing renewable and waste energy sources”.  “There is an urgent need to understand the extent of the challenge and how to meet it,” he said, “not only at a sectoral level but also at the system level. This also needs to identify the barriers to intervention and how to create robust commercial models for industry to engage and the opportunity to build skills in-country to deliver and maintain.” This, he said, should take the form of a comprehensive study to deliver a cooling strategy framework and energy and technology impact roadmap to deliver overall system efficiency, operational energy resilience, reduce lifecycle carbon emissions and pollution, and minimise overall costs of cooling, whilst meeting economic and social aspirations.

At the close, Peters said, it was agreed that the Congress was a valuable event and a second event should be held next year, possibly in India or UAE, with the aim of being a global Congress.

Hannah Jo Uy is Assistant Editor at Climate Control Middle East magazine. She may be contacted at hannah@cpi-industry.com