**The Challenge and Opportunity:**

The **Covid-19** global pandemic increased demand for cooling in patient critical hospital wards, as admissions increased during the early stages of the outbreak. It is also set to increase the heating demand in the winter months to come. According to the BEIS (2019), **heat is the largest energy-consuming sector** in the UK at 44% and the single largest contributor to UK emissions. With regard to cooling, UK demand is dominated by offices (65%) and retailers (30%). Air conditioners are expected to become widespread in the future due to expected rising temperatures. The cooling and heating demand of hospitals and retail spaces must be met by a renewable low-carbon solution integrated with energy storage in order to reach net zero by 2050\. This has given rise to a UK **Thermal Energy Storage (TES) market of approximately 20GWh per year until 2050 (BEIS, 2019), which has a value of £800 million per year**. This creates the need for a sustainable, renewable and efficient heating and cooling energy storage system, with optimised controls for public health buildings and retail spaces.

**The Solution:**

The solution proposed is **a low-carbon renewable heating and cooling system** that utilises **solar technology**, combined with **a sustainably highly compact storage module**. The solution will **provide thermal energy storage for cooling of buildings in the summer, and heating in the winter**. The critical components of the system are powered by solar technology. The power is renewable and the storage module is made from sustainable materials. The system also includes a **control system utilising Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology**, which efficiently regulates the ambient temperature **based on the occupancy of men and women**. It uses Machine-Learning (ML) for forecasting and predicting energy demands.

**The key aspects of the system are:**

* Renewable solar technology that provides power for the components that heat and cool the buildings, based on passive and active setups;
* Storage medium stores thermal energy for cooling in the summer and heating for the winter;
* Control system that will optimise the output to ensure temperature balance based on the gender occupancy;
* The control system ensures that demand is real-time driven, with the ability to forecast and predict future demands.

**The benefits offered by the system are:**

* Significant reduction in carbon dioxide emissions because the energy source is from the sun;
* Significant reduction in the cost of fuel bills related to heating and cooling of public health buildings, retail outlets with scalability to other markets;
* This low-carbon heating and cooling solution will reduce the percentage of power demanded from polluting sources, which will have a positive impact on the UK's net zero targets;
* The control system that socially considers gender;
* The control system is also able to learn and forecast demand based on admittance. This minimises the temperature effects on the virus in Covid-19 wards and public spaces, whilst considering the effect of temperature on the cognitive performance of key workers.