SolarChill is an award winning, breakthrough, solar driven refrigeration technology that is climate friendly and bypasses the use of lead storage batteries. Instead of storing the energy of the sun in conventional lead batteries, the sun's energy is stored in an "ice battery." The SolarChill vaccine cooler uses solar energy to create ice, which then cools the unit in a controlled fashion.
The technology is applicable to both keeping vaccines at the required temperatures and refrigerating food. Up to three billion people live in regions without electricity. Maintaining a secure "cold chain" for vaccines, medicines and food in such regions is a major challenge.
Many regions without electricity use kerosene or propane vaccine coolers, while many places go without immunization programs due to the absence of vaccine cooling capacity. Kerosene and gas vaccine coolers are often unreliable and result in millions of dollars worth of vaccines being spoiled each each year. Other vaccine cooling units common in non-electrified regions use lead batteries. These units are also problematic because lead batteries often break down in warm climates.
Because SolarChill draws on solar energy, it eliminates the use of kerosene and propane and saves on greenhouse gas emissions. The world's 100,000 kerosene-powered units emit about 80,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.
By eliminating the need to refuel the coolers with fossil fuels each week, SolarChill is cost effective. Over their 20 year lifetime SolarChill saves $4,000 to $6,000 in overall costs.
Up to 800 SolarChill vaccine coolers have been deployed around the world today, in 15 countries in South East Asia, Africa and Latin America. They are also used in refugee camps and in earthquake hit zones in Haiti. SolarChill technology based coolers are currently produced in Denmark, Swaziland, UK, and China. SolarChill food refrigerators are not only for developing countries, but also for use in off the grid applications in industrialized countries.
Greenpeace's involvement with the development of SolarChill evolved out of Greenpeace's 1990s success in revolutionizing the world's domestic refrigeration sector through the development of ozone layer and the climate friendly refrigeration technology called Greenfreeze. Instead of using the conventional ozone depleting and potent global warming fluorocarbons in the refrigerator's insulation and refrigerant cycle, Greenfreeze uses hydrocarbons. Today, there are over 550 million Greenfreeze refrigerators in the world, nearly 40 per cent of global domestic refrigeration production uses the Greenfreeze technology and it is expected that by 2020 nearly 80 per cent of the global refrigerator production will have shifted to Greenfreeze.
SolarChill integrates recent solar innovations with the Greenfreeze refrigeration technology.
SolarChill was exhibited by Greenpeace at the 17th Climate Convention in Durban, South Africa. "As the world grapples to arrive at an urgently needed global agreement to reduce greenhouse house gas emissions and to move away from fossil fuels, practical examples, like SolarChill, demonstrate that we can indeed meet human needs using the renewable, clean energy of the sun," says Janos Maté.
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