Decentralising air conditioning for better climate indoors and out: Conry Tech

Conry Tech is decentralising air-conditioning, in order to deliver precision heating and cooling, eliminating waste, improving comfort and indoor air quality, and slashing energy consumption and emissions. They will also be applying their innovative technology to cool the data centers more efficiently that are expanding rapidly to cater for tomorrow’s needs.  

Why Melbourne?

Conry Tech has chosen Melbourne to launch in part due to the founders sense of patriotism, and for the many other benefits it has to offer, such as a strong manufacturing base, a well trained workforce, and a proven culture of innovation. Having scaled the previous few businesses globally and having to move away from Melbourne to scale their businesses, they are optimistic that with advances in manufacturing, and with strong local support, that Melbourne can become a centre of excellence for the HVAC industry, and that they will be able to successfully launch and scale from there.  

Challenge

Air-conditioning is responsible for 15% of global energy related emissions, and it is anticipated it will be responsible for 50% of the growth in energy consumption over the coming decades. This is creating an unsustainable cycle in which air-conditioning is being used as a climate adaptation solution to the problem it is so rapidly contributing towards. We cannot keep rolling out air-conditioning systems without fundamentally raising the bar of our expectations in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability. In addition, the increase in demand for AI applications, and high performance computing is driving the power consumption for data center cooling to extreme levels, and this needs to be minimised. 

Cooling already takes 24% of Australia’s power, and globally these numbers are rising rapidly. 250 new air-conditioning units are expected to be installed every minute, from now till 2050, so this is a huge problem that needs to be addressed urgently. Data centers likewise are taking an increasing amount of power, land and water, and new solutions are needed to minimise the impact of our data driven world. 

Solution

Conry Tech is providing an air-conditioning system that can deliver heating and cooling from 2 - 5x more energy efficiently than current system, which in many cases will virtually halve a buildings power bill, and correspondingly decrease emissions. In addition, it is enabling the adoption of refrigerants with virtually no green house warming potential, further reducing the environmental impact of HVAC. It will also be delivering more energy efficient and compact cooling solutions to datacenters, allowing them to minimise their impact on their environment. 

In addition to the positive climate impacts, in buildings Conry Tech are solving the age old dilemma of many spaces within a building being uncomfortable, either too hot or too cold.  It will also keep the indoor environment healthier, with better air quality management, and provide a far greater degree of flexibility for both building owners and tenants.  In datacenters, Conry Tech’s technology will enable servers to operate at peak efficiency, whilst also allowing data centers to be deployed more simply and compactly, dramatically reducing the cost of the infrastructure. 

Result

Conry Tech has built prototype systems and has commenced testing their technology, with promising results.  Conry Tech has been granted a patent on their decentralised approach to air-conditioning. It has also been successful in obtaining a number of grants that have helped contribute towards the development done to date. 

Conry Tech aim to scale this technology to meet the needs of the global market and anticipate that they will export from Melbourne globally in time. In particular they are aiming at the Americas, and Asia Pacific regions initially, where the growth in air-conditioning is astronomical, and as such energy efficiency must be a critical area of focus.