Comfort cooling load is increasing the demand of electricity in tropical countries. As the living standards rise in these areas, so will the demand for electricity. In India, roughly 30 per cent of the demand for power comes from buildings sector. Additionally, water resources are also getting stressed. Thus there is a need from the users and owners of buildings to reduce the energy required for air conditioning as well as water consumption. Geothermal Cooling System by Green India Building Systems and Services Pvt. Ltd. (GIBSS) is an innovative technology that replaces the rejection of heat to ambient air in the conventional systems by the rejection of heat to ground. In conventional air-conditioning systems, the cooling efﬁciency depends on atmospheric temperature. If the atmospheric temperatures are higher, efﬁ ciency of the air-conditioning system is lower and vice versa. The key innovation behind Geothermal Cooling System is the designing of a heat exchanger system that uses the earth temperature, which is much lower than atmospheric temperature to reject the heat. Lower temperatures signiﬁ cantly improve the efﬁciencies of the air-conditioning systems. Apart from saving energy, Geothermal Cooling System through its close loop piping system also prevents the loss of water and does not require chemical cleaning. This piping system helps channelize the building heat into the earth. The innovation also uses harvested rainwater, which is distributed evenly throughout the geoﬁ eld. The rainwater helps in enhancing the heat transfer efﬁ ciency of the geoﬁ eld. GIBSS uses 13 different strategies to address various conditions of the ground and optimizes the use of energy accordingly.
Residential, commercial and public buildings in India account for 89 million metric tonnes of CO2 emissions. GIBSS through its energy-efﬁcient innovation for cooling buildings has the potential to help businesses reduce costs and increase productivity. If the implementation of these systems in both greenﬁ eld project and in retro-ﬁtting buildings could be accelerated, there is a potential to reduce GHG emissions by about 20 million tonnes by 2022.