India's First Publicly Available District Cooling Assessments Released

India’s first publicly available district cooling assessments have been published in Thane, the District Energy in Cities Initiative’s first pilot city in India. These studies show that district energy can cut energy costs for Thane’s businesses and public buildings, while increasing urban resilience and delivering significant environmental benefits such as a 55% reduction in CO₂ emissions for power and cooling and the option of complete phase-out of harmful refrigerants.

The combined projects represent up to $50 million of investment and the most pressing project, the rapidly growing Hiranandani Estate, is being considered by EESL for its largest trigeneration investment to date in India. The Initiative is exploring all options for the brownfield project including supporting Thane to lead its procurement.

Development of these reports has been a long effort of building local stakeholder trust, collecting hard-to-reach data and bringing international expertise to Thane. The leadership of Thane Municipal Corporation has been significant in developing these studies and will continue to be in order to bring these projects to market. This validates the Initiative’s approach of targeting support at city governments to unlock district energy.

The drafting of these pre-feasibility studies was funded by IFC as part of the IFC-EU Eco-cities programme with financial support from the District Energy in Cities Initiative for data collection and local stakeholder coordination. The analysis was led by the Carbon Trust and ICLEI South Asia led local stakeholder engagement and data collection. Technical inputs and review were provided by Dr. Zhuolun Chen at the Copenhagen Centre on Energy Efficiency (C2E2), EESL and UN Environment. Numerous partners of the District Energy in Cities Initiative contributed in the form of data and peer review to ensure a high-quality product.

Find the prefeasibility study here.