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News: Finalists of the ‘Global Cooling Prize’ (GCP) will be announced at an Award Ceremony being organized by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) under the Mission Innovation (MI) programme.
Facts:
About Global Cooling prize (GCP)
- Ministry of Science & Technology in partnership with BEE & MoEF&CC launched GCP jointly with Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), US in 2018.
- It is an international competition to incentivize the development of a residential cooling technology that will have at least five times (5x) less climate impact than the standard Room Air Conditioning (RAC) units sold today.
About Mission Innovation:
- It is a global initiative of 24 countries and the European Union to accelerate global clean energy innovation.
- MI was announced at COP21 in 2015 in Paris.
Goal: To accelerate the pace of clean energy innovation to achieve performance breakthroughs and cost reductions to provide widely affordable and reliable clean energy solutions.
Objectives:
- Seek to double their governmental and/or state-directed clean energy clean energy research, development and demonstration (RD&D) investments over five years.
- Work closely with the private sector as it increases its investment in the earlier-stage clean energy companies that emerge from government programs.
- Build and improve technology innovation roadmaps and other tools to help in our innovation efforts, to understand where RD&D is already happening, and to identify gaps and opportunities for new kinds of innovation.
- Provide, on an annual basis, transparent, easily-accessible information on their respective clean energy RD&D efforts
Innovation Challenges under MI: It has 8 innovation challenges:
- Smart Grids: The objective is to enable future grids that are powered by affordable, reliable, decentralised renewable electricity systems
- Off-Grid Access to Electricity: The objective is to develop systems that enable off-grid households and communities to access affordable and reliable renewable electricity.
- Carbon Capture: The objective is to enable near-zero CO2 emissions from power plants and carbon intensive industries.
- Sustainable biofuels: The objective is to develop ways to produce, at scale, widely affordable, advanced biofuels for transportation and industrial applications.
- Converting Sunlight: The objective is to discover affordable ways to convert sunlight into storable solar fuels.
- Clean Energy Materials: The objective is to accelerate the exploration, discovery and use of new high-performance, low-cost clean energy materials.
- Affordable Heating and Cooling of buildings: The objective is to make low-carbon heating and cooling affordable for everyone.
- Renewable and clean Hydrogen: The objective is to accelerate the development of a global hydrogen market by identifying and overcoming key technology barriers to the production, distribution, storage, and use of hydrogen at gigawatt scale.
