At DC Climate Week 2026, CoolPact Capital convened leaders across finance, policy, and technology to advance the conversation on one of the most urgent, yet underinvested, climate challenges: sustainable cooling.
We were honored to host Jamie Fergusson, Director for Climate at The World Bank Group, Cara Martin, CEO of OTS R&D, Inc., and Ankit Kalanki, Principal at RMI in a discussion with Alan Miller, Managing Director of CoolPact Capital that underscored both the scale of the challenge and the opportunity ahead.
Key themes from the conversation:
1. The heat is already here. Cooling demand is no longer a future risk—it’s already here. ~3 billion people face extreme heat today, and cooling is emerging as one of the fastest-growing drivers of electricity demand. Space cooling alone is expected to add ~700 TWh of incremental load globally by 2030—four times the size of today’s U.S. data center sector—yet it continues to receive a fraction of the attention.
2. Access at-scale is the challenge. The World Bank Group’s “5×5” strategy underscores the need to scale access, efficiency, and financing simultaneously, while momentum within the UN positions cooling as a human right—not a luxury. As Jamie Fergusson noted, supply is concentrated among a few large players, while demand is fragmented across millions of cost-sensitive end users. This disconnect is even more pronounced in emerging markets, where cooling underpins food systems, healthcare, and livelihoods in power-constrained environments.
3. The technology already exists but deployment lags. Advances across refrigerants, compressors, phase change materials, and heat pumps are well underway. But real-world deployment continues to lag. Yet real-world performance remains a bottleneck—testing in high heat and humidity markets like India shows up to ~30% higher energy consumption than standard ratings, largely due to unaccounted dehumidification loads.
4. Risk capital is the missing piece. The bigger gap, however, is financing. Scaling cooling will require clearer taxonomies for banks (including how to underwrite efficient equipment and refrigerants), blended capital structures to crowd in private investment, and business models that make solutions affordable at the point of use. This is where the next phase of the market will be built.
Cooling sits at the intersection of climate adaptation, economic development, and energy transition. From food systems to healthcare to labor productivity, access to sustainable cooling is foundational to resilience in a warming world. According to IFC’s Cooler Finance Report 2024, the global market for sustainable cooling presents a new opportunity for investors as the cooling market is projected to reach at least $600 billion by 2050.
At CoolPact Capital, our objective is to fill in the missing piece of risk capital to available, scalable cooling solutions that meet the moment.