Buildings are significant energy guzzlers, and a large portion of that energy goes towards cooling, especially with rising global temperatures. But an innovative business model can effectively pair sustainable cooling solutions with servitisation, and offer a promising solution: Cooling-as-a-Service (CaaS).

This episode of The Big Shift: The Climate Finance (R)evolution dives deep into this market-transforming approach. This episode is part of a special series of our podcast show: Youth Voice. Youth Voice episodes create dialogues between students or young professionals and prominent experts to clarify the world of climate finance, cultivate fresh perspectives and catalyse critical thinking within the climate discussion.

Dolf Eck, currently enrolled in a Sustainable Energy Engineering master’s at the Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm, joins us for this conversation exploring a practical example of business model innovation featuring:

• Dimitris Karamitsos, Sustainable Finance Specialist at BASE, describing the servitisation business model and illustrating CaaS with cutting-edge examples.

• Morten Stensli, CEO of Aneo Retail, sharing his experience implementing CaaS in real-world refrigeration projects in collaboration with Danfoss Climate Solutions.

What is Sustainable Cooling? And what does it mean to offer it “as-a-service”?

The first part of the fifth episode sheds light on sustainable cooling, reviewing energy-efficient technologies and natural refrigerants that minimise environmental impact. These solutions address a major problem: our reliance on traditional cooling contributes heavily to climate change.

Servitisation, an innovative business model where companies focus on providing a service on a pay-per-use basis rather than selling a product, holds great potential to foster the uptake of more expensive and difficult-to-operate systems. Dimitris Karamitsos highlights how, under a servitisation or “as-a-Service” model, the equipment provider remains the owner of the asset and keeps the responsibility for its installation, operation and maintenance. When this model is applied to efficient energy systems, the user pays an agreed fee based on usage and immediately benefits from enhanced performance and potential energy savings. 

Sustainable Cooling-as-a-Service (CaaS) is gaining momentum worldwide, with an expanding community of providers and businesses adopting it to overcome the upfront cost barrier when deploying more efficient, better-performing and climate-friendlier cooling solutions.

As an example, Aneo Retail and Danfoss are pioneering CaaS in the Nordics, bringing up fruitful experiences from various pilot projects. In the second half of the episode, Morten Stensli recounts Aneo’s journey from working as a consultancy to offering Cooling-as-a-Service to a broad range of clients, sharing the challenges faced and the tremendous benefits of their solution. The discussion answers key questions on the model, how to implement it, which type of project it best suits, as well as its financial and environmental impacts.

From the discussion led by Dolf emerges answers to the questions:

• What are the benefits of CaaS? What would you tell potential adopters still hesitant to make the transition?
• What are the barriers to entry in the CaaS market? What did you encounter?
• When is CaaS a suitable business model and when is it not?
• In traditional business models, there is no direct incentive to create a product with a long life span. When switching from selling a product to selling the service this product delivers, is there a shift in engineering focus when designing a cooling system? 
• How do you see the future of sustainable cooling and CaaS?

Ready to learn more?

Listen to the full episode here

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