India

The Benefits of Rooftop Solar for Municipal Buildings in India

Originally published on The Climate Centre for Cities (C-Cube) website. If there’s one word to describe India’s goal of achieving 100 gigawatts (GW) of solar energy installation by 2022, it is “ambitious.” Of this, 40 GW need to come from rooftop solar (RTS) systems, which are installed on building premises and…

Mapping the Path to DISCOM Transformation Success in India

In June 2020, RMI India co-hosted its first virtual convening on the Discom Transformation Platform along with the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and NITI Aayog. The event brought together 16 leading civil society organizations (CSOs) to identify new ways of collaborating and supporting distribution companies (DISCOMs), following the recent amendments…

Primer for Space Cooling

Access to space cooling is a critical development need and an issue of equity in a warming world. A significant portion of the population today lives with dramatically lower access to cooling in relation to their need. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that at 1.5°C of warming,…

From In Trouble to Informed

As the coronavirus swept around the world, dramatic upheaval followed in its wake. Many industries have been devastated while others have boomed, joblessness has spiked as automobile emissions and mobility demand have plummeted. The global trend of becoming increasingly digital was swiftly accelerated, making many feel isolated while others collaborated…

We Need a New Approach to Cooling

The world’s first air conditioner was developed in 1902 to remove humidity from a building. Willis Carrier’s invention, that enabled the precise control of temperature and humidity, became the fundamental building block for modern air conditioning, evolving through the 1920s into air conditioners to provide cooling to the built environment.