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Access to Cooling

Cooling technologies are increasingly essential for health, productivity, and climate adaptation and resilience

Refrigerators

The use of refrigerators provides a wide range of benefits, from improving human health and productivity, to reducing the domestic burden on women and children, who are usually responsible for food gathering and preparation.

Refrigerators are indispensable in hospitals and clinics – especially for vaccine storage –and they also enable income-generating activities for small retailers and other value chain actors through the storage of cold drinks, food, and other perishable products for later sale.

Refrigerators, however, are one of the most challenging appliances to design and develop to be both energy efficient and cost-effective for use in rural, off-grid settings. Progress is being made, with early-stage support driving technology development resulting in cost-reduction and efficiency gains. However, the global market overall remains in the early stages of development.

The energy consumption of an average conventional refrigerator compressor currently can only be supported by the largest available off-grid solar systems. Some super-efficient refrigerators are now being designed explicitly for off- and weak-grid settings to consume less energy, some as low as 0.1 kWh per day.

Discover our R&D Fund grantee, Amped Innovation, and their journey to develop affordable solar-powered fridges for sub-Saharan Africa

Fans

Fans

Beyond basic comfort and productivity, access to space cooling appliances like fans can reduce mortality and morbidity during severe heat waves and increase overall health during sweltering months.

Fans are in high demand among off- and weak-grid consumers. However, mainstream off- and weak-grid fans still consume too much energy – sometimes over 10 times as much energy as lighting technology in the same setting. Super-efficient, high-quality fans designed for off-grid energy systems, one of the few commercially scaled solar products, meet customer needs without exhausting energy supply.

Recent technology advancements and design improvements, such as brushless DC motors, could cut fan energy consumption by 50%. Improvements in price and efficiency can be expected to unlock and enable further demand. In an increasingly warming world, fans can only be so effective, and there will be a need for new innovations in space cooling, and to enable climate resilience.

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