The technology of cryogenic cooling is continuing to live up to its billing of being one of the most disruptive technologies the industry, following a high-profile launch event in London earlier this month. The Birmingham Energy Institute Policy Commission — the organization backing the technology — is proving equally disruptive in the often-low-key world of refrigeration by gaining support among academics, politicians and commercial interests alike for its aim to take a systems approach to low-emission cooling.
Via the novel appropriating of the world "cold" as a noun and using it instead of cooling — as in "Clean Cold" and "Doing Cold Smarter" — the folks in the Policy Commission have captured the imagination of opinion-formers in the media and among policymakers. There are more than a few in the conventional cooling industry who are envious of the way that the BEIPC, henceforth known as the Cold Commission, has leaped into the headlines with their soundbites and their infographics and their desire to challenge the status quo. And their funding — that makes some people really jealous.
Some of the data the Commission has established is arresting: Cooling accounts for 14 percent of the United Kingdom's electricity draw (alone making it responsible for 5 billion British pounds of energy), yet it commands only a paltry 0.2 percent of the engineering research budget.
Rather than looking at the disparity as a problem, it can be seen as a sizeable opportunity for U.K.-based engineering, the Commission says.
"The 'greening' of cold is clearly an urgent global problem — but it may also offer Britain a significant business opportunity," acccording to the Commission. "The Policy Commission was set up to look at meeting demand for cold from a systems level to recruit vast untapped resources of waste cold, 'free' cold, waste heat, renewable heat, and 'wrong-time' energy to radically improve the efficiency of cooling, and reduce its environmental impact and cost."
The event in London saw the Cold Commission publish a follow-up to its previous Doing Cold Smarter report — which I wrote about back in April when it was the less catchy Cold Chain Commission — with a high-level technology roadmap, setting out its vision for transforming both transport and stationary refrigeration with a more sustainable approach based on cryogenic techniques.
Naturally, it is called "A Roadmap for Cold."
The roadmap itself has laudably ambitious aims: In its introduction, a landscape is set out that offers tremendous potential for the supply industry and end users alike: "The roadmap for cold is intended to describe what is required to develop a vibrant British clean cold industry that will not only dramatically improve the environmental performance of cooling in this country, but also establish and maintain a lead in a new global market potentially worth hundreds of billions of pounds."
The thrust of the roadmap is that there is growing demand for cooling globally, particularly in the evolving cold chains of the developing world, and equally there is a recognition that the cooling is currently energy intensive. Therefore, there is great potential for sustainable, lower-energy cooling technologies, and these are technologies in which the U.K. is leading — namely cryogenic cooling and energy storage, together with electricity grid-balancing techniques and technologies.
The Commission has identified a four-stage approach to help achieve its goal of "doing cold smarter":
- Reduce cold load/cooling work eg better building design
- Reduce energy required for cooling – eg efficient technologies
- System-level thinking/cold economy – eg harnessing waste heat, heat pumps etc and cold energy storage
- Convert remaining cooling loads to sustainable energy sources
The Commission says it will focus most work on the second and third stages, since potential is high and "nobody has previously investigated the system-level efficiency of cooling."
It sets out five stages: making, storing, moving, using and managing cold, applying some 40 different potential cooling technologies, set out across four different time scales, depending on their availability from 0-3 years to more than 10 years hence. The roadmap identifies technologies, including:
- ice banking and thermal piles for storage
- use of smart technologies for refrigerators
- investigation of solid state refrigeration and other novel refrigeration techniques
- cryogenic cooling and storage
However, perhaps the most intriguing aspect is the sheer number of potential stakeholders the roadmap envisages embracing. These range from energy generators to urban planners to the all-important end-users that we know (from food to data centers), not forgetting the full complement of transport refrigeration users — trucks, buses, vans and boats.
Then, of course, there are the manufacturers, not just of refrigeration systems, but also the gas suppliers, the component suppliers and the innovators in the new areas of fuel cells and magnets and conductors. Overlaying all of this are the politicians and policymakers and the financiers, without all of whom none of the above will have any momentum.
The Roadmap for Cold is without doubt a pioneering piece of work in its attempts to bring a number of different worlds into collaboration with the cooling expertise. It is also nothing if not ambitious, which is how it should be, when pitching to governments, who like a big vision.
Ironically, it may be that getting the conventional cooling industry to see the benefits of collaboration becomes one of the hardest tasks, convincing them it is not an invitation to sleep with the enemy. Whether the result is cooling integration or polarization, only time will tell.
