Argentina.
A group of Argentine students from the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA) won first place in the international Climate Colab competition, organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with an air conditioning energy project.
The proposal of the "Kiri" equipment is intended for residential air conditioning equipment, in such a way that when used in "cool" mode, cooling, they have a minimum setting temperature of 25C (77F). The reason for the proposal is that many users are unaware that energy consumption skyrockets exponentially just by changing the temperature setting by a few degrees.
For example, the team's calculations indicate that just by changing the setting of the air conditioner from 23 to 25 degrees, the energy saving goes from 4% to 14%, that is, it increases by 350%.
If the proposal is implemented globally, the students assure that 327 TWh of energy would be saved, which is equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of countries such as England / United Kingdom, or Italy. The CO2e emissions that are saved are around 194 MtCO2e (million tons of CO2 equivalent emissions), equivalent to the emissions of countries such as Viet Nam, United Arab Emirates, Argentina or Venezuela.
The cost of energy that would be saved reaches US $ 29,500 million, equivalent to the GDP of countries such as Paraguay, Latvia, Cameroon, Trinidad and Tobago or Bolivia.
This Argentine idea was selected from a total of 60 initiatives and 500 participants from around the world, and was the most voted in the category (with just over 1450 votes) and the second most voted overall.
The ITBA Climate Change Awareness "Kiri" team is made up of 9 ITBA students, a network of engineers, many of them ITBA graduates, and those interested in the subject.
Source: http://itba.edu.ar
