A century of air conditioning has transformed lives but also contributed to rising global carbon emissions. One Australian firm believes it can solve both issues at once.
Air conditioning accounts for at least 7 per cent of global electricity use, a figure rapidly rising as heat extremes become more frequent.
Cooling has become one of the most difficult fronts in emissions reduction, as demand increases precisely when the environment is under the greatest stress.
Despite a century of engineering progress, most commercial buildings still rely on a cooling architecture that would be recognisable to its early pioneers.
Modern air conditioning began in the 1920s with the development of mechanical chillers. Before that, cooling was achieved with ice, water and fans. The major breakthrough was the replacement of the ice supply with a machine capable of producing chilled water on demand.
That innovation eliminated the “ice man”, but it also created a design problem that lives on today: cold water is produced centrally, passed through coils, before large fans distribute conditioned air throughout a building.
Evolving technology
Conry Tech co-founder Ron Conry said that engineer Willis Carrier, the inventor of air conditioning, would think the modern technology is still very similar to the original concept.
For much of the twentieth century, improvements in air conditioning efficiency came through enhanced components. Compressors evolved from centrifugal to screw and smaller residential variants, which each had their own applications.
Refrigerants changed, driven less by energy performance than by safety and environmental regulation. Some were highly efficient but toxic, others were safer but environmentally damaging.
Today, the industry has cycled back toward natural refrigerants, often “compromising on safety for the sake of the environment”, according to Conry.
Yet through all of this, the basic structure of commercial air conditioning has remained unchanged.
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The engineering challenge
One reason progress plateaued is that efficiency has traditionally been measured at full load. Buildings are designed for extreme scenarios – the hottest day, full occupancy, maximum solar gain – and equipment is produced with generous safety margins.
“The equipment that goes in is sized for a scenario that will practically never happen,” Conry Tech’s co-founder and CEO, Sam Ringwaldt, told create.
Air conditioning systems operate at or near full capacity perhaps 1 per cent of the time, yet for decades, that single theoretical operating point has dominated system design.
A meaningful shift began with the adoption of variable speed drives. This allows motors, pumps and fans to slow down rather than cycle on and off, reducing energy consumption dramatically.
Although the technology existed from the late 1970s, it took decades to enter mainstream HVAC systems. For centrifugal compressors in particular, the effect was profound.
“As you slow down a centrifugal compressor, you reduce power by the cube of speed,” Ringwaldt said. “So being able to operate a compressor at slower speeds to deliver precise part loads was a radical improvement.”
In the early 2000s, Ron Conry launched one of his best-known inventions, the Turbocor oil-free, magnetic bearing, centrifugal compressor.
By eliminating oil, previously needed for lubrication and sealing, these compressors were designed explicitly around part-load performance and allowed greater flexibility.
“Until then, no one had even thought about the efficiency of an air conditioning system at anything other than full load,” Ringwaldt said.
The BullAnt
After the launch of the Turbocor, Conry and Ringwaldt began working together, founding Conry Tech and what they believe is the next great innovation in airconditioning: the BullAnt.
Designed and manufactured in Australia, the patented decentralised HVAC system engineered to cut commercial building heating and cooling energy use by up to 70 per cent.
Rather than further optimising central systems, Conry Tech has taken a step back and questioned how they can eliminate traditional constraints.
The idea behind the engineering is simple: different spaces within a building rarely need the same cooling at the same time.
“But even if you have a sensor in those rooms, there’s very few levers that can be pulled to adjust that,” Ringwaldt said.
ConryTech’s approach decentralises cooling into modular micro-chillers, known as BullAnts, each serving a small zone rather than an entire building. This allows cooling to be supplied precisely where and when it is needed.
“We have come up with a micro-system that’s designed for only about a quarter of a floor, rather than one for a building,” Ringwaldt said. “Now we can distinguish very easily between east and west, between level 10 and 20, between an unoccupied floor and a fully occupied floor, between a cafe requirement and a lawyer’s office.”
Crucially, it also allows both sides of the refrigerant cycle to vary. Instead of fixing chilled water at 7°C everywhere, the previous standard, temperatures can provide precise amounts of heating and cooling.
“For the first time ever in air conditioning, we can float this temperature to match exactly what the need is,” Ringwaldt said.
Spaces that do not require deep cooling no longer impose unnecessary energy costs on the entire system. The efficiency gains come not from squeezing incremental efficiency improvements, but from eliminating over-conditioning altogether.
Ringwaldt said that much of the industry is currently focused on areas such as software, sensors and AI.
“However, in commercial buildings, no one’s really creating levers – what they’re creating is data,” he said. “We think that this will radically revolutionise the air conditioning industry – if the Turbocor was a mobile phone, we’ve just made a smartphone.”
