Where Cooling is Needed

Whether it’s keeping your food fresh in the fridge, a doctor retrieving a vaccine from the refrigerator, or relaxing in an air-conditioned room during summer – cooling is about safety, comfort and efficiency. Nonetheless, the need for cooling goes far beyond just your home, office, or hospital.

Sustainable conditioning is essential for maintaining air quality, controlling humidity, enhancing energy efficiency. The HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) sector is a growing and important field. The HVAC market is expected to expand from $249.4 billion in 2024 [2] to $367.5 billion by 2030 [3]. Most of applications are projected to be driven by adoption of smart building technologies, attracting to the market real estate developers and industrial facilities.

But cooling applications extend far beyond HVAC in homes and buildings. Cooling is crucial across sectors such as:

• New sustainable farming methods, such as vertical farming, heavily rely on temperature control.
• The boom of e-commerce has increased the need for reliable and sustainable refrigeration technologies in food cold chain logistics.
• Around 80% of biological medications and 90% of vaccines can’t be produced today without a temperature-controlled environment. [4]

Cooling is becoming a shared requirement across more and more sectors. But some demands are scaling faster than others. Among them are data centres, those giant facilities used to store computer systems and associated equipment. That’s where huge amounts of information for websites, apps, and online services are processed. [5]

Okay, but what do cooling systems have to do with it? Well, in fact, data centres would be just a chaos without cooling systems. Equipment would overheat, causing websites, apps, and online services to slow down or become completely unavailable. Critical data could be lost or corrupted, impacting personal files and business records. Cyberhackers would seize the opportunity, leaving no organization with secure data. And in the worst-case scenario, overheating could cause electrical components to catch fire leading to catastrophic consequences.

Nowadays, the world has around 11,800 data centres. [6] But the raise of AI will definitely make this number change, moreover dramatically, and within the next decade. By 2030, Europe’s data centres, driven by the rise of AI, are expected to require 35 gigawatts of power [7]. This is nearly equivalent to the total power consumption of Denmark in 2022.