AS A supplier and installer of energy-efficient air conditioners in the 1990s and 2000s, Kaer has always made it a priority to stay ahead of the sustainability curve.
But over time, the company – which was operating under the name SuperSolutions then – realised it was not meeting the needs of its customers.
Companies wanted more energy-efficient air-conditioning in their buildings, but lacked the resources and time to operate such cooling systems.
“They wanted 23 deg C cool air and 65 per cent relative humidity,” said David Mackerness, director at Kaer. “We were selling the equipment they wanted, but it was equipment they didn’t know how to use because it wasn’t part of their core business.”
The realisation led SuperSolutions to rebrand itself as Kaer in 2009, before transforming its business model to offer cooling-as-a-service in 2013.
Back then, the service was a radical idea – building owners were used to investing in and operating cooling infrastructure, but Kaer was making the pitch that they should purchase cool air from it instead, at a fixed rate on a pay-per-use basis.
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All cooling hardware and software would be owned, operated and paid for by Kaer. For customers with existing infrastructure, the company would buy the cooling assets from them, and take charge of operating, maintaining and upgrading them. This would free up the customers to focus on their business priorities, said Mackerness.
Kaer is one of the winners of the Impact Enterprise Excellence Award for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) at the inaugural Sustainability Impact Awards, organised by The Business Times and UOB. The judges commended the SME for the impact its cooling systems have had on energy savings and carbon emissions reductions. As a pioneer in the cooling-as-a-service space, Kaer is a founding member of the Cooling as a Service Alliance, launched in 2019 by the Basel Agency for Sustainable Energy (Base).
Exploring ‘carbon-free’ cooling
The early days were challenging. Back then, the industry was so nascent that cooling-as-a-service did not even exist as a term, Mackerness recalled. “For the first three to five years, we thought that perhaps we were going on the wrong path. To us, this was the way forward, yet we couldn’t find anyone else doing it,” he said.
Today, the company delivers cooling to 24 buildings in Singapore, three in India and one in Malaysia. By Mackerness’ estimates, this adds up to about 15 million square feet (sq ft) of space – a number that is set to grow to 25 million sq ft in the next year.
“Tenders used to be all about designing and building cooling systems. But now, we see tenders for cooling-as-a-service and customers asking for it, which is a big shift,” he said.
Data has been critical in helping Kaer to optimise the energy efficiency of its cooling assets across its portfolio.
The company has a building monitoring and control system that collects data from every single plant it owns. This data is then fed through a patented artificial intelligence platform, in turn driving the performance and energy efficiency of its plants. “Every bit of data from every plant helps us to improve other plants in the portfolio,” said Mackerness. “We probably have the biggest data-sets for cooling systems in Asia.”
The company’s next focus is on transitioning to renewable energy.
“As a business, we want to be carbon-neutral as quickly as possible,” said Mackerness. “There are two elements to that: one is how much energy we use, and the second is what the source of that energy is.”
Over the last three years, the company has managed to transition 7 per cent of its energy portfolio – from zero initially – to renewable energy to run its cooling systems. This involved working with one of its clients, 1Elpro Park in India, to power its cooling systems entirely using energy generated from solar panels installed on the building’s rooftops.
Kaer was also the first cooling provider in Singapore to successfully pilot a low global warming potential (GWP) refrigerant in 2021.
The company has since moved 5 per cent of its cooling equipment to systems that use refrigerants with a GWP of 7, an improvement from a GWP of 1,400.
By providing clean, renewable and carbon-free cooling, Mackerness estimates that Kaer has saved 25,000 metric tonnes of carbon across its portfolio every year – equivalent to the amount sequestered by 30,000 acres of forest in one year.
Now or never
Despite these gains, Mackerness believes it is now or never for the world to move towards cooling-as-a-service.
According to a report by the International Energy Agency, cooling accounts for 10 per cent of global electricity consumption and associated carbon emissions today. It predicts that energy demand for space cooling will more than treble by 2050.
“If that happens, we will absolutely miss the Paris Climate Agreement targets, no matter what else we do,” said Mackerness.
More competition is hence needed in the cooling-as-a-service industry, he said. According to Base, as at 2021, there were at least 18 companies across four continents that have integrated cooling as a service in their operations.
To Mackerness, cooling-as-a-service is a win-win for solution providers and customers – simply because it is in every business’ interest to be “as efficient and sustainable as possible”.
“Cooling-as-a-service aligns with the requirements of the business that you’re supplying to,” he said.
“It aligns with the community requirements of sustainability, and it aligns with the business’ profitability requirements because if you can give cooling for lower amounts of energy, you essentially reduce your cost.”
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