Carbon-Negative Solar Cooling

About

There is currently no affordable solar fridge in emerging markets. For example, in the wholesale markets of Zimbabwe you can find many $200-300 AC fridges but only one or two solar fridges and those are $1000-2000!, completely unaffordable to someone living in Sub-Saharan Africa. Amped is making the first affordable solar fridge at $530 to the end user. How did we do it? Instead of costly lithium batteries, we use an ice “battery”. Amped’s fridge has far better performance on all the metrics that matter for off-grid fridges compared to alternatives on the fridge database on Verasol (a public database of fridge solutions: https://data.verasol.org/products/ref?&layout=list). We have a 45 minute pull down time to 4C versus an average of 3 hrs on Versaol (thanks to our powerful compressor). Our autonomy is 40hrs versus an average of below 1hr. A critical design feature is our unique ability to freeze an ice pack while not freezing the fridge chamber (important for cans of coke). Amped is a team of product design professionals with a deep expertise in solar power electronics. We built all the circuits and firmware in the EasyFreeze from scratch and have full control over the design. Our circuits have 1/3rd the circuit components as our competitors and thus are extremely low cost to build in mass-production quantities. Unlike others in the market, our solution functions well as either fridge or freezer. This is important because we can use the same parts in China and get higher volumes and lower cost-of-goods right from the start. We’re excited to scale up our solution and partner with Coca-Cola to bring next-gen cooling technology to those who need it most. Over the past five years, Amped has sold over 190,000 solar lighting and television products in emerging markets. We can leverage our manufacturing expertise in China to achieve low costs on our fridge right from the beginning. We have received grant funding from the UK-based Efficiency for Access Fund for early R&D of our fridge to get it to the point it is today: the R&D is completed and now we’re ready to scale up into mass production. Even though our initial fridge is 100L, our design approach can be applied to making a range of fridge sizes: 50L to 500L. Every EasyFreeze has 0 Carbon emissions and the potential to save 16MT CO2 / unit / year compared to running a cheap AC fridge on generator power (which is the main competition). It comes with a built-in bluetooth smartphone app for a beautiful display interface, performance monitoring, and carbon offset tracking.