International News
GUIDELINES FOR ASSESSING
COOLING NEEDS OF A COUNTRY
An international partnership has published guidelines to
help countries measure their cooling needs, in line with
the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and
the Nationally Determined Contributions required by the Paris
climate agreement.
The guidelines are described in Cooling for All’: Needs-based
assessment/Country-scale Cooling Action Plan Methodology, the
result of a collaboration among the Heriot-Watt University, the
Centre for Sustainable Cooling (CSC), and the Sustainable Energy
for All (SEforALL) group.
To fulfill the cooling needs of a nation or region sustainably,
the government and community, “must understand the cooling
demand and supply strategies available,” the report says.
The authors have developed a draft framework that countries
can use to quantify cooling needs to support “mitigation,
adaptation and solution-delivery strategies.” The framework is
designed to enable countries to understand and manage “both
the societal cooling gaps today and the needs tomorrow in a fastwarming
world.”
It can help countries develop their National Cooling Action
Plans (NCAPs), addressing policy, technology, capacity building
and finance measures.
The authors note that after the draft framework has been
tested in a country, they plan to convert it to an online toolkit
that allows decision-makers to input data and design or simulate
a range of solutions based on a country’s needs, demands and
objectives. The authors invite comments from all stakeholders.
The methodology is designed to cope with the global need
for cooling as a necessary component in food preservation,
human health, and commercial practices, given the projected
five-fold increase in energy demand from cooling by 2050. The full
publication is available from the CSC website.
In 2019 the UN-Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, urged
countries to develop their own NCAPs to address the human need
for cooling while also reducing the impact of climate change.
However, the current NCAPs are based on historical equipment
trend analysis and projections,the report notes. “They are not
need-oriented nor designed to address the need for cooling
across all sectors.”
In place of this limited scope, the report proposes
a methodology based around the demands of Clean
Cooling for All, a holistic approach to refrigeration and air
conditioning systems that incorporates the most efficient and
Konstantin Kirillov
environmentally friendly technologies while addressing the
societal need for cooling equipment.
FOUR LEVELS OF NEED-ASSESSMENT
The report outlines four levels of planning for cooling. Countries
should assess bottom up needs for cooling and the subsequent
energy requirements to meet them as the first level for creating a
robust cooling action plan.
This would consist of accurate information about international
treaty commitments, climate data, and the cooling mechanisms
currently in place.
According to the report, having assembled an accurate data
set, the second level consists of developing insights about future
cooling needs in the supply chains, and also the barriers and
opportunities of intervention at the present condition.
The third level is where countries identify suitable
econometrics models to estimate and predict cooling needs
as well as energy requirements, associated emissions and
economic impact.
The fourth level consists of scenario-based assessment
and recommendations. Here, country-specific Clean Cooling
scenarios can be tested against the BAU [business as usual]
scenario results for evaluation and policy development.
The Needs Assessment and Cooling Action Plan Methodology
thus provides governments with the tools to understand—
through the data—cooling in terms of societal cooling needed and
the energy equivalent to meet that need under different scenarios
compared to business as usual methods. RACA
The draft framework developed will convert to an online toolkit
that allows decision-makers to input data and design to simulate
a range of solutions.
www.hvacronline.co.za RACA Journal I October 2020 7