District cooling follows a simple process:
- Water is chilled at a central cooling plant (or taken from the sea).
- Chilled water is pumped through a network of underground pre-insulated pipes to customers’ buildings.
- An air-conditioning water system inside the customers’ building circulates the chilled water.
- Air is then pumped through the chilled water piping of the air-conditioning system producing cold air.
District Cooling is 40% - 60% more energy efficient than conventional systems – and reduces CO2 emissions.
If District Cooling were to expand to 25% of the cooling in Europe, 42-50 million tons less CO2 would be released into the atmosphere each year.