Promoting sustainable Green Cooling worldwide

Participants from 17 countries met at the Green Cooling Week 2017 in Berlin to exchange current trends on environmentally friendly cooling technologies.

From September 25th to 29th about 40 participants from 17 different countries met at the Green Cooling Week 2017 in Berlin organised by the Green Cooling Initiative (GCI) in order to exchange about the latest environmentally friendly cooling technologies and to jointly develop new ways of using, disseminating and promoting sustainable Green Cooling worldwide.

Centrepiece of the Green Cooling Week was a “design thinking workshop”, a user-centred methodology aiming at developing innovative solutions to a practical problem. Participants were put at the centre of the design process and explored alternative ways of sustainable cooling technologies in developing countries. Groups came up with innovative certification schemes and flexible facilitation entities (i.e. a mobile training truck) and reflected on ways how to define new policies by respecting the beneficiary’s needs. This enabled participants to think out of the box and equip them with new ideas to promote green cooling in their respective home countries.

At the beginning of the week, participants visited the ATMOsphere Europe 2017 conference, which presented current trends in mass-market solutions using natural refrigerants such as ammonia, CO2 and propane. The GCI presented a case study on the needs to develop international safety standards for hydrocarbon (HC) refrigerants in commercial refrigeration and air conditioning (RAC) appliances. Whilst the interest in the use of HCs in commercial RAC appliances is growing, market and product development is obstructed by the charge size limits given in product safety standards. Charge size is either limited by room area, unit installation height or quantity of flammable refrigerant, often making it impossible to use sufficient refrigerant to cool a given room. The case study gave an overview on revised safety standards submitted and soon to be approved by the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC).

A final field visit during the Green Cooling Week provided insights into the current state-of-the-art green cooling technology like adsorption chillers that generate cold and use heat as the drive energy.

The GCI is a global project funded by the International Climate Initiative (IKI) by the German Federal Ministry for Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB) and implemented by GIZ Proklima. The project helps design more efficient processes and structures in cooling and climate control and accelerates the transfer of emission-reducing technologies in developing countries. To this end, partners are setting up a 'green cooling' network to spur cooperation between technology providers and users in industrialised countries, developing countries and emerging economies.