Doing cold smarter: Innovation road map

Abstract

Cold is vitally important to modern day life. It underpins the supply of food and medicine, enables the growth of data networks and makes buildings and transportation more comfortable. The lack of cold has massive social and environmental impacts. The demand for cooling is expected to boom, and unless we find new ways to make cold sustainable the environmental impact will be ruinous. Yet the UK Government currently spends less than 0.2% of its engineering research budget on cooling.

The ‘greening’ of cold is clearly an urgent global problem – but it may also offer Britain a significant business opportunity. The University of Birmingham 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. It also produced a high-level technology roadmap to guide next steps and longer term progress with the support of stakeholders from innovators to end-users.

Developing policy and action on clean cold will help deliver: - reduced carbon emissions and better air quality; - energy resilience; - global food security; - economic growth, in-country jobs and skills.