A Cool Calculator to Support Net Zero Planning
The Climate Action Pathway for Net Zero Cooling laid out, for the first time, a vision for action to 2050. The associated Action Table has now detailed key milestones to deliver this vision. These documents describe an ambitious aggregated pathway to net zero emissions for cooling. In practice, there is no single pathway that covers every geography and sector but instead, there will be a collection of pathways to zero that are sensitive to specific conditions such as climate, infrastructure type and policy.
To help stakeholders plan their own scenario for a 2050 cooling sector, a “Cool Calculator” – an open source excel-based 2050 scenario tool – has been developed. The Cool Calculator allows stakeholders to run simple but open calculations on key aspects of cooling decarbonisation, empowering them to identify a set of solutions that works best for particular regions and/or sectors.
This Cool Calculator is a 2050 scenario tool that complements existing techno-economic models that focus on specific aspects of the cooling sector. These sophisticated models have varying levels of transparency about their underlying assumptions, functionality and data sources. The Cool Calculator works alongside these models to help net zero cooling pathways to be based on transparent assumptions, quantitative evidence and recognisable & usable data.
We would like to thank all those who provided their time and effort to testing the beta version of the Cool Calculator and provided us with valuable feedback.
How to use the Cool Calculator
The Cool Calculator has been developed in Microsoft excel to enable ease of use and accessibility. After downloading the tool, please also allow for macros to run in your excel programme as the Cool Calculator uses this to provide you an easy user experience.
Please ensure you read the “introduction” tab in the Cool Calculator which provides an overview of the tool and a step by step guidance on how to use it.
With the objective of creating a simple and open tool, you can run and see the output of analysis in three simple steps after downloading as outlined below.
Step 1 – Click on the “Pathways” tab and explore the three in-built pathways compared to the baseline and choose one of them and click “see my results” button.
Step 2 – If you want to create your own pathway, click on the “take me to the advanced pathway selection button” and choose your assumption of efforts across the ten variables and then click “see my results” button
Step 3 – See the results of your in-built or advanced pathway choice and follow the button next to each of the dashboard charts to see more detailed analysis. If you want to run a different pathway or edit your advanced pathway choices, use the buttons at the top of the results dashboard page.
We hope the Cool Calculator provides you with useful insights and supports the decarbonisation efforts of the cooling sector globally.
If you have any questions on the tool or have ideas on how to make it better, please send an email to coolingefficiency@carbontrust.com.