Kick Off Meeting of CoolST Project: Paving the Way for Energy Resilience in South Tyrol

This week, the CoolST project, coordinated by Eurac Research, held its highly anticipated kick-off meeting at Eurac Research Hed Quarter in Bolzano.

The project aims to provide an in-depth analysis of the cooling market in South Tyrol (ST), offering insights into the number of installed cooling units, categorized by type and sector (residential, tertiary, industry, and transportation). By quantifying current energy consumption and generating projections for 2040, CoolST seeks to clarify future energy needs and lay the foundation for optimal strategies to address them.

One of the key deliverables of CoolST is the creation of a Knowledge Hub—an online, open-source repository containing meticulously assembled and quality-controlled data and information about ST’s cooling market. Additionally, a user-friendly Tool will be developed to transform this data into easily comprehensible knowledge, such as graphs.

Given the increasing significance of households in this context, CoolST will place a particular focus on the residential sector. The project will employ various bottom-up approaches to generate missing primary data. A comprehensive market analysis will be conducted to identify supply chain structures and assess the market shares of manufacturers, sellers, and resellers at the provincial level, facilitating direct data retrieval.

Furthermore, parametric simulations will be performed using local climatic datasets, social clusters, and archetypes. The outcomes of these simulations will be compared and evaluated by experts, and juxtaposed with the limited available results from reliable scientific sources.

CoolST will take an interdisciplinary approach, intersecting fields such as engineering, architecture, economics, user behavior, ecology, health, and policies. By gathering extensive data and information about the cooling market in ST, the project aims to deliver a thorough investigation of the current status and future developments.