News – Blog
Announcing the winners of the Million Cool Roofs Challenge
2 March 2022
After a tough competition (made even more difficult by the pandemic) and a long deliberation, the judging panel has selected team Cool Roofs Indonesia from Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia (UPI) as the winner of the Million Cool Roofs Challenge.
Cool Roofs Indonesia is led by Beta Paramita, an Asst. Professor at UPI, in collaboration with Millennium Solution, USA and Ravi Srinivasan, a Professor at The University of Florida.
Prior to the challenge, cool roofing in Indonesia was not a part of building practices and norms. Any product, if available, was developed locally and not for the express purpose of providing thermal comfort, and was too expensive for most to afford. Awareness of cool roofs, their purpose, their benefits, and product options was also extremely low in the area. UPI, with support from the manufacturer, established a small facility to produce CRRC-rated coatings in Indonesia at a fraction of the price of other available options. They also undertook pilots on residential, government, factory, school, and religious buildings to gather performance data and to raise awareness.
Overall, the team were able to install cool roofs in 15 cities on 70 buildings and have also piloted the solution on rural affordable housing structures, with an aim to update future building specifications to include cool roofs. The team measured and verified indoor air temperature reductions of over 10 degrees Celsius in some of the pilots.
Overcoming COVID-related challenges
As well as dealing with all of the ups and downs of the challenge prize progress, the finalist teams also had to contend with COVID lockdown measures and closed borders. Despite this, between the teams they have covered over 1,000,000 square meters of roofing globally, in addition to influencing local policy, providing local communities with more comfortable environments to live and work, and training and employing.
What we didn’t discuss or anticipate was that the world would be turned upside down by the arrival of COVID-19, which would make the existing challenges that much harder to overcome and introduce a world of new challenges that we would all have to address as and when they surfaced. Each and every team has been dramatically impacted: cool roof coatings weren’t being shipped; coatings that were ready to be applied to roofs were going to waste in warehouses; quarantines halted almost all construction work for months; and Governments that were just starting to be intrigued and excited by the results of early demonstrations, were suddenly thrust into survival and recovery mode. The Million Cool Roofs Challenge had become the Million Challenges Challenge.
Congratulations to the winners and well done to all of the finalists for continuing to make great progress despite a challenging couple of years. We look forward to seeing how you continue to make a positive impact on tackling heat stress across the globe.
What is the Million Cool Roofs Challenge?
The Million Cool Roofs Challenge is a global competition to rapidly scale up the deployment of highly solar-reflective “cool” roofs in developing countries suffering heat stress and lacking widespread access to cooling services.
Why did we do this?
Cooling is fundamental to the supply and storage of food, medicine and vaccines, and for ensuring the quality of life and productivity of citizens. Yet around the world millions of people die every year from causes related to a lack of access to cooling.
Reflective building surfaces reduce the demand for cooling energy for those that can afford it while also providing a sustainable passive cooling solution for the billions of people who do not have the economic means to access mechanical cooling options, in poor rural areas, urban slums and homeless shelters.
Reflective roof surfaces not only have an impact on individual buildings, but deploying them across a whole community can have a net effect on reducing local ambient temperatures. Further, the deployment of reflective materials creates sustainable jobs and skills opportunities for low skilled workers in both rural and urban contexts.
