New vistas
Traditional comfort cooling comes from individual air conditioning units, usually mounted on the outside walls of each room, apartment or building section.

Old-fashioned air conditioning of this kind usually results in unsightly blemishes on any building, and on the urban landscape in general. They can make even attractive, well-designed buildings ugly. They also use large amounts of electricity to produce a relatively limited cooling effect, as well as being noisy and occupying valuable space in commercial premises.

By contrast, modern district cooling opens up significant new vistas for comfort, operating efficiency and environmental responsibility in the design and operation of modern buildings of all kinds.

New paradigm
District cooling represents a paradigm change in ensuring comfortable indoor environments - all year around. Providing the required cooling effect from a high-efficiency central facility makes a huge difference to production and distribution infrastructure costs, operating costs, performance and reliability.

Centralised supply via pipe systems in which there is hardly any loss of thermal energy makes it possible to achieve substantial economies of scale as well as to benefit from advanced technologies designed from the ground up to be environmentally responsible.

District cooling paves the way for technology breakthroughs that are ideal for use as the backbone in 21st-century urban development projects, as well as important new thinking about how to deal with the practical effects of climate change.

According to figures from Euroheat & Power*, centralised district cooling set-ups are more than 5 times as energy-efficient as traditional single-unit air conditioning.
*www.euroheat.org