Cooling without warming: Innovative global award winners to be announced 29 April

The Global Cooling Prize Grand Award Ceremony will take place on April 29. The ceremony is the culmination of process to incentivize the development of a residential cooling solution with at least five times less climate impact than standard Residential/Room Air Conditioners (RAC) units on the market today.

The Global Cooling Prize, of which eceee is a partner, manages a global coalition of leaders to encourage technology innovation, to tackle growing demand for room air conditioning. 

The process has been very fast. The innovation challenge was launched in November 2018. In just a year, November 2019, the Global Cooling Prize coalition could announce eight finalist teams and awarded each team $200,000 to support the subsequent stage of the Prize, which is prototype development and delivery. In 2020, six of the eight Finalists team delivered two working prototypes to the designated test locations in India.

Billions of people risk being exposed to increasingly dangerous heat conditions. They need access to cooling, but without warming the planet.

Today, there are 1.2 billion room air conditioning units in service around the world and it is estimated that the number of units will increase to at least 4.5 billion by 2050. If inefficient, these units will a be a burden for the electricity grid infrastructure and consumers in developing countries and could add an estimated 132 GT of CO2-equivalent (CO2e) emissions cumulatively, between now and 2050.

Apart from avoiding climate change, drastic transformation of residential cooling technology through innovation can improve people’s health, productivity and well-being, it is stated on the Prize Award web site.

The Ceremony will be streamed on Facebook and YouTube.

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