This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on August 9, 2021 - August 15, 2021

In tropical Malaysia, air conditioning is integral to modern life. Even without the travails of extreme temperatures and heat waves, more and more people are relying on artificial cooling to stay safe and comfortable.

The country’s urban population increased from 10 million to more than 15 million between 2000 and 2010 alone, making Malaysia one of the most urbanised countries in East Asia, behind Japan, South Korea and Singapore, says the World Bank.

But with high levels of urbanisation and rising affluence come ever-increasing energy use. And air conditioning will be one of the top drivers of global electricity demand over the next three decades, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its 2018 The Future of Cooling report.

To meet the demands of urbanisation and global climate goals, environmentally friendly technology solutions are urgently needed to meet the demand for cooling in the coming decades, says Thomas Baudlot, CEO of ENGIE in Southeast Asia.

“We cannot go without cooling in our daily lives in the region, and that drives energy usage a fair bit. Our estimates are that 30% of energy use in the region relates to cooling, either for individual or business purposes,” he adds.

Two trends are driving this — the majority of the Southeast Asian population is migrating to cities, which should house two-thirds of the people in these countries by 2030, and lifestyle is evolving so that plain old ceiling or standing fans are being swapped for energy guzzling air conditioners.

“It’s not a surprise that within the next 10 years, the demand for cooling is set to double,” Baudlot points out.

Here’s where the city can take a hand. “If [city planners] don’t do anything about the way the cooling of cities is managed, building and planning as they have always done without thinking of infrastructural efficiencies, they will have a problem,” he says.

The French multinational company, which provides integrated and sustainable energy solutions, operates 393 district heating and cooling networks globally, including four district cooling plants in Southeast Asia.

In Malaysia, ENGIE has been managing Pendinginan Megajana — a joint venture between ENGIE Services Malaysia and Cyberview — providing round-the-clock chilled water for air conditioning to 51 buildings in Cyberjaya township’s data centres, malls and office towers. Apart from Megajana, ENGIE runs the Northgate district cooling plant in the Philippines and the district cooling systems for the Punggol Digital District in Singapore.

According to market research firm Statista, in 2017, nearly 75% of Malaysia’s population lived in cities, with more than seven million people in Greater Kuala Lumpur — a metropolitan area that includes Putrajaya, Shah Alam, Petaling Jaya, Klang, Subang Jaya, Selayang, Ampang and Sepang.

As countries are racing against time to mitigate the devastating consequences of climate change, it is crucial that future infrastructure is designed to limit increases in temperature to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

“There is a bit of a perverse effect if we can’t manage to meet that objective because as the planet gets warmer, we will need more energy to cool our cities and that would tax the energy system. So really, cooling is one of the critical issues for the region and needs to be addressed in a systematic way,” says Baudlot.

Rising temperatures are already fuelling environmental degradation, natural disasters, extreme weather, food and water insecurity, economic disruptions, conflicts and terrorism.

That is why the development of smart district cooling systems is pivotal to improving the management of energy demands, says Baudlot.

Air conditioning releases about 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO) — the primary greenhouse gas emitted through human activities — each year. Global energy demand from air conditioners is expected to triple by 2050, Baudlot points out.

The IEA says the new electricity capacity required will be equivalent to the combined electricity capacities of the US, the EU and Japan today. The global stock of air conditioners in buildings will grow to 5.6 billion by 2050, up from 1.6 billion today, which amounts to 10 new air conditioners sold every second for the next 30 years, the agency adds.

But visionary cities and countries have been able to decarbonise cooling and achieve renewable energy and CO targets with modern district cooling systems.

“Using air conditioners and electric fans to stay cool already accounts for about a fifth of the total electricity used in buildings around the world — or 10% of all global electricity consumption today. But as incomes and living standards improve in many developing countries, the growth in air conditioner demand in hotter regions is set to soar,” says the IEA, adding that the use of air conditioners is expected to be the second largest source of growth in global electricity demand by 2050.

It says the supply of power to these air conditioners comes at a large cost and with environmental implications. “One crucial factor is that the efficiency of these new air conditioners can vary widely. For example, air conditioners sold in Japan and the EU are typically 25% more efficient than those sold in the US and China.”

District cooling systems help address one of the critical challenges countries in Southeast Asia will be facing in the years to come and it is essential to the development of smart cities, says Baudlot.

District cooling produces chilled water centrally for distribution to nearby facilities through a network of insulated pipes to achieve efficient air conditioning of buildings. By aggregating the cooling needs of a network of buildings, district cooling creates economies of scale that drive efficiency, balance electric loads and reduce fuel costs.

Additionally, the utilisation of solar as a renewable source of energy, automation, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and self-learning algorithms have made district cooling more efficient and generate substantial savings, he says. “For example, we can configure and automate the district cooling system to count the number of people that are in an office and adjust the temperature of the office to the number of people.”

That was why Sunway Construction Group Bhd entered into a joint venture with ENGIE last year. Via the partnership, the developer will engineer, finance, construct, develop, operate and maintain district cooling systems for greenfield and brownfield urban development projects. These include some of Sunway’s portfolio of office buildings, malls, educational institutions, medical centres, hotels, resorts, theme parks and factories.

“I believe we can move even further and make [district cooling] a systemic approach where any new development of a city is embedded with such technology at the design stage,” says Baudlot.

The cooling system is also beneficial when it comes to cooling data centres, he adds. “When we use district cooling, instead of using individual air conditioning systems, we can significantly reduce the usage of energy to somewhere in the range of 20% to 40%. The reduction in terms of energy usage translates right away into CO savings.

“I see an untapped potential for Malaysia. District cooling is a capital-intensive physical infrastructure, which is why it is not suitable for decentralised, individual residential units. But when deployed at scale, building owners can recover the capital and operating costs over a 30- or 50-year lifetime — the benefits of the system stretch far beyond the reductions in CO emissions.

“If we plan the development of cities well, we can anticipate densification and then we can design efficient infrastructures that will make cities more efficient. Designing district cooling is just like designing water and waste infrastructure — it is a shared infrastructure.”

Apart from delving into district cooling projects, ENGIE entered into a joint venture with TTL Energy Sdn Bhd earlier this year to develop a 100mw solar plant in Kerian, Perak. The Kerian Solar Plant is part of the Energy Commission’s Large-Scale Solar (LSS) scheme to increase electricity generation from renewable energy, by developing nearly 500mw of LSS projects. The project is scheduled for commercial operation in 1Q2022 under a 21-year power purchase agreement with Tenaga Nasional Bhd.

But large-scale projects aren’t the only sustainable means of achieving the nation’s climate targets, says Baudlot. “There are a number of things you can do at a smaller scale. The Malaysian government’s Net Energy Metering (NEM) programme provides a pathway to self-generation with excess energy sold back to the grid.

“Companies that have solar panels installed on a big roof and not enough activity to consume the entire output of their system can export the electricity back to the national grid, which will then be distributed across the country. At the moment, the quota is relatively small, but efforts to boost renewable energy usage are heading in the right direction.”

The NEM 3.0 programme will be in force until end-2023 and is aimed at allocating 500mw of rooftop photovoltaic capacity.

Save by subscribing to us for your print and/or digital copy.

P/S: The Edge is also available on Apple's AppStore and Androids' Google Play.