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Radical Innovations to Keep Cool

Heriot-Watt University Principal and Vice-Chancellor Richard A Williams has written the introduction to a recently published report, The Hot Reality: Living in a +50°C World, warning of an urgent need to deliver sustainable cooling to continue to support lives around the world. The report calls for a radical shift in policy to create more ambitious strategies for delivering cooling and effectively managing energy use and achieving reductions in cooling demand.

Read the report’s foreword here as a summertime blog from our Principal.

This month has seen the publication of a report on “The Hot Reality: Living in a +50o C World” [1], including work by Heriot-Watt staff. Clean cooling is one of the greatest societal needs to improve human life. It is also an area that has been lost in the clamor of voices in the sustainability arena and largely forgotten as part of core pathway in the journey to net-zero energy transition. Why is this?

Over sixteen years ago research by Professor Yulong Ding and Toby Peters in my own research group, when I was at University of Leeds, resulted in the first prototype for demonstrating that cryogenic liquids could be used to mitigate large scale energy storage and, further, provide a source of cold services on a large scale [2]. Further, cryogenic fluids could be used to drive a cryogenic engine. Both of these applications have come to pass into reality. I remember being asked in a Sky News TV piece why something so radical and transformational had not been discovered before. I answered, well it had. The first patent for air liquification was in 1875 in USA and even in the early 1900s cryogen powered cars existed in the form of the New Jersey Cryogenic Car Company, until succeeded by Henry Ford’s petroleum driven vehicles. There were also electric vehicles at that time.

The contemporary issue is that often we seek radical innovations using complex new pathways (fuel cells, batteries, complex materials) whereas solutions can sometimes lie in basic physics and well-known phenomena. Indeed, in the future I believe we will see a resurgence of ‘simple tech’ that is implementable at scale at high levels of reliability. There are engineering solutions to grand challenges such as sustainable cooling and sustainable large- and small-scale energy storage. As with most technologies that appear radical, finding sufficient funding to implement them is difficult as many commercial funders are risk averse - since radical technology disrupts existing markets or, as in the case of energy and cold storage, may not even have a business model into which it can fit. Therefore, they fail the test of having a credible business model for short-term investment.

The pandemic and climate change has accelerated the drive to seek solutions to keeping things cold, but the reality is that this has been a forgotten area for too long. The report I have highlighted actually build on two decades of the earlier work of Professor Toby Peters, Professor Yulong Ding and Dr Tim Fox who have been ardent advocates for moving the dial in national governments and global public understanding of the need and opportunities to do things differently. Their role in this societal challenge has been critical, highly impactful and is to be much commended.

As we look here at the necessity to assure that sustainable cooling is embedded as part of national infrastructure in nations, we must also recognise lessons of the past that have impeded development and scaling out of new utilities and services.

I offer five:

  1. Education at all levels needs to recognise the global scale of the need. At college and university level there is a need to feed in sustainable cooling into our curricula. Fortunately with good case studies emerging, such as the Highview Power’s deployment of 300MWh storage recently announced [2], good materials will be available.
  2. National Academies have not always clocked the significance of the topic; this is down to the awareness of national-level engineers and policy makers. We can all do more on this and the recognition of sustainable cold utilities as part of the critical national infrastructure will focus attention on this.
  3. The focus of education at technical, college and university level need to be resident in the geographical areas and communities that are most in need of adoption of the technology (Africa, Middle East, India, South East Asia etc). To this end the creation of technical colleges across these domains such as the initiative in forming the Africa Centre for Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold Chain in Rwanda [3]. These projects involving collaboration between Universities of Birmingham, Heriot-Watt and Rwanda, and other partners, are critical for skill development and other sister sites are under development in other heat challenges countries. Professor Phil Greening and (SoSS) and Professor Ted Henry from EGIS has been leading out with our connections into the Rwanda College and some of related scholarship programmes in southern Africa [4]. Also working with Associate Professor Alex MacLaren and student teams including ‘Engineers without Borders’, to scope and delivery on demonstration project on the use of phase change materials (these can store and release cold) for rural farming communities in Zambia and assisted by the Watt Club Zambia.
  4. Investment to support sustainable cooling will come from bodies with a strong sense of corporate purpose and those who wish to make long term investments with high impact. This is not to say there is no short-term business here, far from it.
  5. Understanding how SDGs work together will find the ability to deliver sustainable cooling to be at the nexus of many of the imperatives. Health, water use, and food security are critically dependent on a cold chain and sometimes not even a chain but, importantly, the availability of sustainable cold locally to every citizen.

We can and need to work harder, and collaboratively, to deliver sustainable cooling to support the lives of citizens. In so doing we will also mitigate climate change effects and grow new economic opportunities. I am pleased that Heriot-Watt is a place that is driving forward in its leadership of this key area.

Richard A Williams, July 2024

  1. The Hot Reality: Living in a +50oC World - Summary Report and Full Report
  2. UK Infrastructure Bank, Centrica & Partners Invest £300M in Highview Power Clean Energy Storage Programme to Boost UK’s Energy Security, Highview Power
  3. Rwanda’s Environment Minister opens Africa’s sustainable cooling and cold-chain centre, University of Birmingham
  4. Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold Chain Systems (ACES), Edinburgh Business School, Centre for Logistics and Sustainability