Collaborative development of renewable/thermally driven and storage-integrated cooling technologies
Cooling is the fastest-growing use of energy in buildings but is also one of the most critical blind spots in today’s energy debate. Rising demand for space cooling is putting enormous strain on electricity systems in many countries, as well as driving up emissions. Comparing to heat, power, and transport, cooling had long been under-represented in the EU energy policy until 2016 when the European Commission took the first step with the launch of its Heating and Cooling Strategy. The strategy identifies actions of ‘increasing the share of renewables’ and ‘reuse of energy waste from industry’ as two key areas for decarbonizing cooling to meet the EU’s climate goals by 2050. Accordingly, the targets are only achievable with fast development and deployment of new efficient and effective cooling technologies driven by either ‘renewable electricity/heat’ or waste heat. This CO-COOL RISE project assembles an international, interdisciplinary consortium from 12 research institutions and 5 industrial companies to collectively accelerate the cooling technology development and deployment, with complementary expertise/skills including composite solids, phase change materials (PCMs), complex fluids, process intensification (heat and mass transfer), cold thermal storage, refrigeration systems, as well as techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life cycle assessment (LCA), marketing analysis, and entrepreneurship skills. Based on the innovation of composite solids (sorbents/PCMs) and fluids (PCMs and hydrate slurries) as well as related components and systems, the project aims to develop renewable/recoverable energy driven, storage-integrated cooling technologies which could offer energy resource-efficient and cost-effective solutions to meet end-users’ low carbon cooling demand.