Australia has a very sunny climate, with high demand for air conditioning. Air conditioning’s impacts upon the electricity network and the environment threaten to affectour quality of life. On hot summer’s days, the electricity grid increasingly faces the danger of overload due to air conditioner use, which would cause essential service disruption and severe economic impact. Associated with air conditioning’s high use of energy is significant environmental pollution, namely in the form of greenhouse gas emissions – with the resultant climate change impacting not only upon our environment, but also our health and productivity.

Of the many ways of individually addressing air conditioning’s impact upon the grid and environment, solar air conditioning (SAC or solar cooling) is one of the few solutions that provides cooling and addresses peak loading, and does so with reduced environmentalimpact.