What the media say about decarbonised cooling and marine energy, and how it echoes Value Park’s work.
Our team publishes on the CHU Sud Réunion SWAC in the Revue Générale du Froid
Quentin Bessodes and André-Charles Mintsa Do Ango, of Value Park, have published a technical paper in issue 1200 of the Revue Générale du Froid et du Conditionnement d'Air, published by the Association Française du Froid. They trace the shift from conventional vapour compression to ocean thermal energy for cooling the CHU Sud Réunion hospital in Saint-Pierre, describing the chosen principle, a closed fresh-water loop cooled by deep sea water pumped offshore, and the performance gain it delivers over a conventional cooling plant.
Our take
Publishing in the reference journal of the French refrigeration industry marks a milestone: the CHU Sud Réunion SWAC is no longer presented as a promise, but as an engineering case study submitted to peer scrutiny.
Cooling networks: a low-carbon alternative to air conditioning
As summers grow ever hotter, individual air conditioning is spreading, but it releases heat into cities, consumes a lot of electricity and often relies on polluting refrigerants (PFAS). Les Échos highlights the alternative of cooling networks: a plant captures a renewable or recovered cold source (groundwater, rivers, geothermal energy…), chills water distributed through pipes to buildings, sometimes with ice storage to absorb demand peaks. Still emerging in France, these networks are set to grow strongly as demand for cooling rises.
Our take
This is exactly Value Park's field: SWAC is a cooling network fed by deep sea water, a 100% renewable source, with no fluorinated gases, reaching an EER above 10 and up to -80% of cooling electricity.
MAEVA: deep-sea-water energy research backed by the ANR
The French National Research Agency (ANR) supports a multidisciplinary research programme dedicated to valorising the energy of deep sea water. Its goal: to identify and remove the technical, environmental and economic barriers that still slow the deployment of technologies such as SWAC and OTEC. Launched in 2024, it runs over several years.
Our take
This is the framework of our MAEVA programme and OTEC Lab: we model and optimise these systems under real conditions, to make marine energy a reliable sector.
Actu-Environnement reviews the deep-sea-water cooling (SWAC) project at the CHU Sud Réunion hospital in Saint-Pierre. Regulatory approvals have been obtained and ADEME support confirmed, paving the way for a system set to sharply cut the hospital's air-conditioning electricity use thanks to cold water pumped from the deep.
Our take
CHU Sud Réunion is our flagship project: we apply SWAC there to target up to 90% less air-conditioning electricity.
In March 2023, L'Usine Nouvelle featured Value Park, winner of the EDF Pulse Start-up award in the “Low-carbon production” category. The La Ciotat start-up explains how it uses deep-pumped sea water as a cold source to provide air conditioning and produce renewable electricity, targeting island territories in particular, and announces a demonstrator for cooling industrial equipment. As its head of innovation notes, “only 0.1% of the renewable energy produced comes from sea water”: a still largely untapped resource.
Our take
Press and institutional (EDF) recognition of Value Park's vision: turning deep sea water into a genuine decarbonised-cooling and marine-energy sector.
On BFM Business's Tech & Co show, a Value Park representative presents the start-up's approach: harnessing the cold of deep sea water to provide air conditioning and produce renewable electricity, on the occasion of the 2023 EDF Pulse Start-up award.
Our take
A media appearance spotlighting our vision of decarbonised cooling and marine energy.