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Cities are feeling the heat more than outlying areas. The increased use of vegetation, reflective surfaces, building codes promoting ambitious energy efficiency standards and district cooling are being employed to provide heat relief and facilitate sustainable cooling for urban dwellers
The problems with excessive heat are clear to anyone living in the cities where thermometers posted record highs in summer 2021, and increasingly to lawmakers, who see the health and economic impacts of the raging temperatures
UNTAPPED RESOURCE District cooling systems could be used more widely as a low-carbon way of cooling buildings
ALTERNATIVE TECHNOLOGIES Cities are looking to cool their urban areas beyond electricity-based solutions
KEY QUOTE Cooling is one of the mountains in front of us if you look at the drivers of climate change ...
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Building design is key to reducing demand for energy guzzling air conditioning
Development of sustainable buildings is moving fast, pushing them to being energy producers rather than energy consumers. One example is UN City in Denmark
New York City has been testing a pilot version of a tool developed to estimate emissions from its buildings, potential refits, costs and benefits
District heating, where heat from a central generator is distributed underground to warm a network of homes or businesses, is commonplace in Denmark and other Nordic and Baltic countries, but, until now, it has remained a rarity elsewhere in Europe
The IEA regards broader adoption of energy efficient technology as the “first fuel” in tackling climate change. High efficiency industrial motors and drives could cut global energy consumption by up to 10%, according to Morten Wierod, president at ABB Motion
Charlotte Søndergren, head of heat planning for Danish HOFOR, questions whether collective heating is the best long-term solution for all countries or whether smaller, individual heat pumps offer a better alternative in some areas.
It is beyond discussion that the global climate emergency calls for solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and requires decarbonisation. Often, the spotlight is aimed at renewable energy as the solution, but in fact, we can achieve 44% of the required global reductions by capturing the potential of energy efficiency, argues Lars Knaack of Novenco
Geneva is changing its technologies and its ways of working to become a truly smart, energy efficient city, argues Patricia Solioz from Geneva Industrial Services, a public utility
