Sustainable Cooling Project

Access to cooling for homes, workplaces and food supply chains is critical to achieving sustainable development goals, and it must be achieved without accelerating global warming. The Sustainable Cooling project will explore and demonstrate a solution for resource-efficient cooling, that utilises the lower temperatures found beneath the ground surface.

It has long been known that the stable temperature beneath the ground surface can be exploited for heating in cold climates and more particularly cooling in hot climates. If air-conditioning could exploit this resource cost effectively then it could offer a significantly more energy-efficient solution than traditional active cooling technologies.

The Sustainable Cooling project will explore the feasibility of this solution.  It proposes to use a steel ‘screw pile’ inserted into the ground as a heat exchanger to access the cooler temperatures underground.

There are four partners involved in the project, one of whom is based in Kenya which is a target market for this solution.