Compiled by Carlotta Verita

TOWARDS A PARADIGM SHIFT IN SUSTAINABLE COOLING

An award-winning technology developer (Liquid Air Energy Storage/Highview Power and the Dearman Engine), Professor Toby Peters leads the University’s Birmingham Energy Institute’s activity around the Cold Economy and Clean Cooling and Cold-chains (for food and vaccines /pharma). He researches on the whole-system solutions for transition to sustainable cooling and cold-chain.

Toby is co-Director of the Centre for Sustainable Cooling. He is the key person behind the establishment of the first-of the-kind Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-chain (ACES). Toby is also a Senior Advisor on Cooling/Cold-chain for Sustainable Energy for All, UNEP’s Cool Coalition and the World Bank Group and is a part of numerous international advisory boards.

Toby has built up a globally focused integrated research programme on “clean cold-chain and cooling” and its role in contributing towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris Agreement related Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), and the Kigali amendment to the Montreal Protocol simultaneously. Toby spoke with MPU’s Jayaraj Manepalli, on the ongoing developments and challenges in the cold chain system. Excerpts from the interview.

Toby, could you tell us the background and the context on the need for Clean Cooling solutions and the current challenges in the cold chain economy?

In an increasingly warming world, the world is off-track to meet the 1.5°C objective of the Paris agreement. We are also lagging behind in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals and adapt to fast increasing climate heat. More than a billion people face immediate risk from a lack of access to cooling. It is projected that by 2070, three billion people could be “exposed to mean annual temperatures warmer than nearly anywhere today.”

Coming to food, 12% of the total food produced is lost due to lack of cold-chain—enough to feed an estimated 1 billion people with value destruction of over USD 380 billion for smallholder and subsistence farmers. Each year, 1.5 million people year lose their lives due to vaccine-preventable diseases, Over 20% of pharmaceutical products are damaged due to broken cold-chains. Increasing temperatures may also reduce labour productivity by as much as 12% in South Asia and West Africa by 2050, resulting in up to 6% GDP loss annually. Increased heat stress can reduce global GDP by $2.4 trillion in 2030. Therefore, the urgent need to find cooling solutions that are sustainable.

The current approach to tackle global food challenges is fragmented – data sharing and collaboration is sporadic and little top-down. We need to have a holistic view of how the system is performing. Key challenges from current donor strategies include inefficient allocation of resources & suboptimal investment – more production without addressing postharvest loss, more cold storage buildings without other functioning elements & connectivity, donor-driven projects that are not market-oriented and depend on grant funding to continue and old technology that is not climate-friendly and expensive.

Because of these challenges, there needs to be a paradigm shift towards sustainable cooling, providing affordable access to clean cooling for all with minimal climatic impact. We also need to design for climate adaptation (cooling in +50ºC climates) and system resilience.

Your work on ‘Clean cooling’ seem to address some of these challenges. Could you explain more about this?

Cooling accounts for over 7% of global Green House Gas (GHG) emissions and is the fastest growing GHG contributor in the world. In a fast-warming world, Clean Cooling is simply resilient cooling for all who need it, while simultaneously contributing towards achieving society’s goals for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction, climate change mitigation, natural resource conservation and improving air quality impact. It must be accessible, affordable, financially sustainable, scalable, safe, and reliable to help deliver societal, economic and health goals.

‘Clean Cooling’ is the benchmark that is at the intersection of the Paris Climate Agreement, the Kigali Amendment, the Montreal Protocol and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Specifically, as we migrate from fossil fuels to renewables, we need productive use of energy strategies – understand the multiple cooling needs and define strategies which “Reduce, Shift, Improve, and Aggregate” cooling and the right mix of novel energy vectors, thermal stores, cooling technologies, business models, behavioural and policy interventions to optimally integrate the available resources through self-organizing systems. In short, thinking systems and “thinking thermally.”

How does “thinking thermally” help? Does it lead to energy efficiency? Could you explain us more on the thermal symbiosis?

Delivering Clean Cooling will require “thinking thermally.” It means mitigating the need for active cooling where possible, minimizing the natural resource use and employing circular-economy design principles, including repurposing of waste heat and cold (thermal symbiosis) throughout the lifespan of the cooling system.

When we talk about energy, we inherently mean electricity. Moreover, when we talk about energy storage, we inherently mean batteries, but in fact, most of our energy consumption is thermal heating in the global north and cooling in the global south. When we think of energy storage, we should be thinking in terms of thermal solutions rather than chemical.

When we look at the thermal energy and energy systems perspective, we can conflate different services. For example, the back end of a cooling system is heat or hot water, so one can have energy efficiency by harnessing that hot water to use in a different process. Efficient use of energy by conflating systems is an interesting route to overall energy efficiency, because one is harnessing waste. So likewise, I can harness this waste heat to drive absorption chillers to produce cooling. I think that is the most efficient use of energy.

My estimate is that globally, whether we like it or not, Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is going to be a major primary source of energy for electricity generation for the next 20 or 30 years. LNG is gas packaged in cold, extracted from the ground and around 600 litres becomes compressed into one litre of LNG, which is shipped to another country.

It is then unpackaged–stored at minus 160 Celsius and then brought back to ambient temperature to put it in the gas grid. All of that cold energy is thrown into the sea or we burn the gas to heat it up. I think we should be harnessing that–to drive cooling for vehicles, district cooling data centers, cold stores. Since LNG is a fossil fuel and is going to be here, we need to harness that waste cold and use it to reduce burning gas to produce cold. Therefore, that is why one needs to look at a systems approach. Likewise, how can we take the waste heat from the back of a chiller cabinet and use it to provide heating services? How can we think thermally across systems?

How should one look at the cold chain system? What are the elements in the complexity of the cold chain system?

Storing food or vaccines involves precooling the cold aggregation, the cool staging the vehicles.
Multiple elements going from farm to market and finally to the plate. Likewise, for vaccines, there are multiple elements going from manufacturer to finally the recipient’s arm. Injecting into a child or an adult in a remote part of the world has to go through many stages.

Clean cold-chain and cooling plays a critical role in contributing towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris Agreement related Nationality Determined Contributions (NDCs), and the Kigali amendment to the Montreal Protocol simultaneously.

There are many elements to the complexity–the first is that it is a chain and not a single piece of equipment. It is a part of the system and it has to hold that temperature right all the way through it.

Second, this system is dependent on the choice of energy, the business model and the maintenance. There is no point in selling equipment if it cannot be repaired quickly if a breakdown happens. Then, it is about the policy environment, the trained technicians. It is about many elements. Therefore, we need to look at the whole system-it is the whole system of systems. All the pieces of technology and all the elements of business, policy and training in one joined up approach because there is no point if you pull out any one piece and the whole system collapses.

One of the important projects you lead is the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-chain (ACES). Can you tell us a bit more about this? Because Africa is the one of the continents, which lacks cold chain facilities, especially considering the critical importance of addressing food security and malnutrition challenges. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement, which make cross border trade between the African countries easier, creates enormous potential to address the challenges.

The Africa Center of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold Chain (ACES) was a project that I had designed and developed working with a great team of UK academics and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA), funds it. This programme was designed as “Born in Rwanda, pan-Africa and global in vision” with ACES acting as the African reference and knowledge development hub.

Rwanda supported and provided us with a campus in Kigali, funded the campus and built a demonstration hall. They also provided us with a 200-hectare farm alongside the campus. We got a refrigeration-training centre and a food quality Lab (being built). We are also building an environmental test chamber. This gives us the ability to test the equipment in Africa for Africa—a place where knowledge is created and equipment tested.

Prof. Toby Peters at the inaugural of The Telangana Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold Chain in Hyderabad, India. Also in the picture are K T Rama Rao, former Minister for IT and Industries, Telangana (right) and Gareth Wynn Owen, British Deputy High Commissioner to Andhra Pradesh & Telangana (left).     Pic: Toby Peters

The core premise behind the center is that we have a big problem to answer–How do you feed 10 billion people in 2050 whilst protecting an economically empowering 400 million smallholder farmers, many of whom are dependent or on their income from one or two hectares of land without using diesel or high GWP refrigerants and make them climate resilient? That is the challenge we have set out to answer and this is the basis of the ACES and the idea is, that this big problem, is actually a system of systems challenge.

It has both vertical and horizontal system. On the one hand, a cold chain is about all the elements to move the product but it is about all the elements to move the product from the farm to the market, which could be a distant market and keeping the product in the right temperature at the right quality and protecting the value. ACES aims to undertake collaborative research, test new equipment, develop knowledge, training programmes and robust business models.

The core delivery structure is like the ‘hub and spoke’ model. Individual Country-led centres “Specialized Outreach and Knowledge Establishments-SPOKEs” interact with ACES to share, implement the research, innovation and knowledge in different African countries, and build capacity. The first SPOKE is in Kenya, led by the Africa Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), which in turn acts as the reference SPOKE and support team (Africa Clean Cooling Institute) for roll-out into other Africa markets; initially Senegal, Lesotho and Rwanda itself. Additionally, this model is also being replicated in India with two Centres in early design stage with the Governments of Haryana and Telangana states. Today, we have 62 academic researchers and experts from across the UK, Europe, and half of them, based in Africa and India.

Apart from the work being done so far globally, which areas you think need the focus of governments and policy makers so that it contributes towards accelerated actions and solutions to address the climate challenges?

Three big global agreements are already in place. There is the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, Paris Agreement, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and our job is to deliver all three of them at the same time. When you look at all three, cooling and cold chain is right at the heart. How do we feed the world? How do we run all of our services from data? How do we protect farmers’ incomes? It all revolves around cold chain. Meeting the requirements of the Kigali amendment is around how do we both mitigate and adapt for climate change.

For technology needs, we need to look not only at the current technology, but also at where we want to be in 10 or 15 years’ time. We have to transition from mitigation to adaptation. When you make the right technology choices and this comes back to the right refrigerant choices. Therefore, we are doing a lot of modelling work and obviously, you have to look at the electrification of transport as well. We need to look into the whole system.

Just as we consider water systems or energy supply or telecommunications is critical infrastructure, for me the first point is that governments have to recognize that cooling and cooling chains as critical national infrastructure and they need to audit and understand how resilient it is to higher temperatures.

For example, if we talk about food, about 40 % of food in many countries is lost post-harvest and that number will only increase in a warming world. Currently, up to 95% of investment goes into increasing food production and not on post-harvest management and the supply chain that helps us mitigate the food loss.

The key aim of our work is to get governments to realize is that they are not going to meet any of their big policy goals, without solving the cooling and cold chain challenges and at the same time, they have to do it in an environmentally sustainable way. Cooling should be on every agenda because the one thing we know going forward is to survive, let alone thrive, in a warming world. We will need more cooling and if we do it wrong, we will just make the world get warmer quicker.