Manik is Founder/CEO of Therma. Manik was recognized in the Top 100 Harvard Alumni in Tech and has worked at D. E. Shaw and the White House.
With 2023 bringing a record heat wave to Texas, along with the worst fire season in Canada’s recent history (causing unprecedented air pollution in NYC and beyond), many experts have drawn a correlation between extreme weather and global warming.
As the founder and CEO of a company that offers a cooling intelligence platform, one of the ironies of today’s fight against climate change I’ve noticed is the negative feedback loop that underlies so many drivers of global warming. This destructive, self-reinforcing cycle is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the cooling sector. In warmer weather, we need more cooling—refrigeration and air conditioning (AC)—than ever. Yet these technologies are contributors to global warming.
Like many bellwethers of modern economic development, this “cooling crisis” reflects a central tension of our generation: How do we improve human health without damaging our planet’s health?
Our Cooling Crisis
How often do you think about your refrigerator or air conditioner? Mostly, they’re left on in the background and keep us well-fed and comfortable. For the better part of a century, cooling has largely worked in the same way. We purchase a piece of equipment, plug it into the wall, and don’t think about it again—until it breaks or needs replacing.
At the same time, refrigeration and AC can contribute to climate change in three ways: food waste, refrigerant leaks and energy use.
Despite its massive carbon footprint, research suggests that demand for cooling is growing. According to a Center for Global Development report (via The Guardian), most of the population is expected to move out of extreme poverty by 2050, and with the standard of living rising for these individuals, people are likely to desire greater comfort in their living and working spaces; want more fresh food than ever before; and seek access to temperature-sensitive vaccines and pharmaceuticals. Shifts like these should be celebrated—they reflect an expansion of human well-being.
But new expectations and consumption would require an increase in cooling capabilities. The refrigeration and AC sectors are poised for rapid growth if what exists today no longer suffices in the future. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the AP reported that nearly 3 billion people lived in areas where “temperature-controlled storage is insufficient for an immunization campaign to bring COVID-19 under control.” A few years ago, The Guardian noted that AC power consumption is expected to grow 33 times by 2100 due to urbanization and the rise of developing world incomes.
We should celebrate when people around the world gain access to better food and pharmaceuticals (refrigeration), as well as greater comfort and convenience (AC). Yet, in the face of such inarguable progress, cooling is already responsible for nearly 10% of global emissions, according to one estimate (via the BBC). If warming accelerates the need for more cooling, this negative feedback loop could get worse in the decades ahead.
We need greater awareness—and rapid innovation—to turn vicious cycles of development into virtuous ones. To do so, it’s important to first understand how cooling causes warming.
Food Waste
Inadequate or faulty cooling causes significant food waste, as equipment issues force businesses to throw out perishable products. According to 2013 estimates from the International Institute of Refrigeration, 13% of food is lost due to lack of refrigeration; put another way, an improved cold chain could feed 950 million people per year. And this waste could cause tremendous warming—if it were a country, one report estimates that food waste would have been the third largest emitter of CO2 equivalent in 2013.
Refrigerant Leaks
Project Drawdown has identified refrigerant management as the top currently available climate mitigation practice. These chemical compounds make refrigeration and AC possible, yet chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)—a class of chemical refrigerants—“can produce more than 10,000 times as much warming [as CO2], pound for pound, once they are in the air,” according to MIT News. One kilogram of the refrigerant R410a has the same greenhouse effect as two tons of carbon dioxide or running your car for six months. In the U.S., we permit businesses to leak up to 30% of refrigerants from industrial process refrigeration before they have a duty to repair their equipment.
Energy Use
Beyond the ultra-warming effect of refrigerants, cooling uses enormous amounts of energy. AC and electric fans alone account for nearly one-fifth of all electricity consumed in buildings globally, according to a 2018 IEA report.
Cooling already uses a ton of energy. (Well, technically, it emits over 100 million metric tons of CO2 into the air each year.) And energy use increases on hot summer days as systems have to work overtime. This overtaxing of electricity grids contributes to the use of dirty and expensive “peaker plants,” which amplify the carbon footprint of cooling.
Cooling Intelligence
As the saying goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Our cooling crisis is a thumbnail sketch of a larger challenge: Businesses need to develop smarter and more sustainable ways of delivering goods and services and supporting modern life.
There are many possibilities. Cooling today is mostly “dumb”—not connected to the cloud or optimized with data science. Users leave a piece of equipment running uninterrupted for years, resulting in blind energy consumption. Imagine a world in which refrigerators and air conditioners learned to power up or down based on utilization (for example, automatically turning off when schools are closed for holidays). Or they could provide extra cooling during times of the day when electricity is cheaper and cleaner and run slightly warmer when that power is expensive and dirty. (Full disclosure: My company offers a platform with some of these capabilities.)
Transforming cooling into intelligent batteries and developing cleaner refrigerants that have less of a warming effect are additional solutions to explore.
While innovators are developing smarter and more sustainable cooling solutions, both cost and inertia represent key challenges to adoption. To transform the status quo, they will need to ensure companies see savings on their energy and equipment bills with their solutions. It’s important to ensure clean cooling solutions deliver financial ROI without sacrificing comfort or convenience. And with new climate-positive tax incentives through state and federal programs such the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the math is likely to get better each year.
Ultimately, the “cooling crisis” is just a microcosm of our broader climate crisis: They require that we mobilize innovation and ingenuity to advance human health while protecting the planet’s health.
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