The Adapt Interview Series #4 Charlie Bilsland (Temperate)

Here's a fact that should stop you in your tracks: there is no such thing as cooling.

Every air conditioner, every refrigerator, every cooling system ever built doesn't actually 'cool' anything — it just moves heat from one place to another. The refrigerator ejects it into your kitchen. The AC unit ejects it into the street. Twenty percent of global electricity is spent doing nothing more than shuffling heat around — and not very efficiently, either.

Charlie Bilsland and his co-founders at Temperate think there's a better way: send the heat to space and be done with it. Using passive daytime radiative cooling, Temperate's NIX unit attaches to existing refrigeration condensers and dispatches heat as infrared light directly through the atmosphere. This means refrigeration units don't have to work so hard or consume as much electricity. The upshot is more reliable heat transfer and a lower risk of refrigeration downtime.

In this conversation, Charlie walks through the physics of heat transfer (accessibly), the pivot away from a home cooling product that was, in his words, "less achievable but more exciting," and why he thinks too much capital is chasing SaaS products and data center cooling — and not nearly enough is going toward the kind of welfare-level heat solutions that will matter most to ordinary people as temperatures keep rising.