Prize finalists to be announced

The Global Cooling Prize has announced that its finalist award ceremony will take place on November 15, 2019, in New Delhi, India.

The prize seeks to catalyse innovation by calling upon global innovators to develop cooling solutions that have at least five times less climate impact than standard entry-level room air conditioning technology in operation today. When scaled, this technology has the potential to mitigate up to 0.5°C of global warming by the end of the century.

At the award ceremony, up to 10 finalists that have the potential to meet all the technical criteria will each be given the first instalment of the US$200,000 prize award. They will then be expected to use this money to develop and deliver two working prototypes of their cooling technology to Indian locations for testing in 2020.

The ceremony will feature these breakthrough cooling technologies as well as special remarks from global and national leaders on the dais. The event is being co-hosted by India’s Department of Science and Technology, Mission Innovation and Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI).

At last count, the organisers had received a total of 445 submissions from innovators across 56 different countries led by the US and India and closely followed by Canada, Australia (18 submissions), China, Japan and a number of EU member nations.

“These submissions are from a diverse set of innovators including individuals, startups, major AC manufacturers, notable universities and research institutions,” says Global Cooling Prize manager Radhika Lalit.

“Based on the submission descriptions, we believe we will see a wide diversity of solutions through this competition, some of which are more efficient derivatives of today’s vapour compression technology and some which are not-in-kind technologies including thermoelectric, electrocaloric, and barocaloric to name just a few.”

The next competition milestone is the deadline for Detailed Technical Applications, on August 31. After this, the Technical Review Committee of the prize will select the finalists.

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