Singapore is drawing up its first national climate adaptation plan, a comprehensive response to climate change, but of particular interest is its use of district cooling as a remedial measure.

District utilises large, centralised plants to deliver chilled water to buildings through underground piping. Cold supply water enters the building and flows through a heat exchanger, absorbing heat from the building space before recirculating back to the central plant through a closed loop.

Using district cooling can reduce the strain on the electric grid caused by increasing demands for air conditioning with an economy of scale that drives efficiency, balances electric loads, and reduces fuel costs.

According to the International District Energy Association (IDEA), direct cooling also allows for more creative technologies such as lake or ocean water cooling, grey water recovery, treated sewage effluent, and thermal energy storage.

The concept is one of several measures the world will need in the future, as heat rises and productivity falls as a result. In fact, keeping cool will be a major issue.

Cool is also valuable, in the investment sense. A joint paper in 2024 from the IFC and UNEP-led Cool Coalition joint report, Cooler Finance: Mobilizing Investment for the Developing World’s Sustainable Cooling Needs, predicts that sustainable cooling represents an $8tr investment opportunity in developing economies by 2050 and identifies numerous private investment opportunities across different segments of the cooling market, including space cooling, refrigeration, cold chains, and transport. Critically, it also highlights the need to increase the adoption of cooling strategies.

But as cooling is perhaps the solution, the problem remains heat. Over and above the various methods of reducing emissions, the core problem of too much heat is also an evolving one.

As George Harrison said, in Taxman, “I’ll tax the heat”. Where there’s tax, there’s government. As mechanisms such as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) are designed to regulate carbon, heat is a taxable item. ‘Waste heat’, the excess heat created by energy generation or industrial processes, is already being addressed through the EU Energy Taxation Directive and incentives such as the Climate Change Levy (CCL).

In future, temperature might be measured as much in dollar signs as centigrade.

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