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Artica has raised the bar by lowering temperatures, says Richard Lofthouse

Artica is only 14 months old and has a team of just five but its potential is exciting a lot of people. The company claims to have cracked the technology to slash the energy used in air-conditioning units by up to 90% and, given that air conditioning and refrigeration accounts for around a 10th of all greenhouse gases emitted globally, the commercial potential is, well, enormous.

Equally head-spinning is the fact that Artica was actually spun out of an industrial design course at London’s Royal College of Art and that the stimulus for the research which led to its core product, was simply asking customers what problems they would love to find solutions to. “Innovation is a transparent process,” says CEO Mathew Holloway, 30, who, with a damp smartphone from cycling around London and barely enough coins to pay for coffee, exudes the slightly scatty air of a true entrepreneur. “In fact, if you actually study innovation, although there are various theories about it, the process is not that big a mystery.”

On their design course the soon-to-be Artica team learned from Workspace Group, a commercial property company, how difficult it was to properly ventilate – let alone heat and cool – old buildings. Whereas a new office block might have better defences against these practices (such as non-opening windows and climate control systems), there are hundreds of thousands of older buildings where the occupants are often uncomfortable and enormous amounts of energy are wasted daily.

“At that point we knew what product we needed to invent,” says Holloway. “It had to be green and save customers money, and it had to include ventilation and not just heating and cooling.”

By the time their course was complete, Holloway and his team – Daniel Becerra, Karina Torlei, and William Penfold, (MBA graduate Matthew Judkins joined later as the commercial lead) – had designed an entire ventilation system complete with heating and cooling properties.

Consisting of an insulated duct from outside – a box full of fans, filters and blowers to circulate the air around a room – the heart of the system lies in a heat exchanger (called a thermal battery module) whose function relies on the disparity between day and night temperatures. The heat exchanger stores up cold at night, releasing it in the day by cooling hot air drawn from outside and delivering it as a gentle, cool breeze. The same process works in reverse at night so that the unit can produce warm air instead.

Although he concedes that this might mean the system is less effective in very tropical climes where the day/night disparity is less pronounced, Holloway, says it would work fantastically well in a desert where temperatures plummet at night.

However, glimpsing global domination of a lucrative sector was not the same as having a viable business and even now Artica is at a delicate juncture, despite having won a string of prestigious prizes, culminating in the The Good Entrepreneur award.

Holloway says initially the team carried on with their part-time and freelance jobs until they found a berth at the Design London Incubator, in the south of the capital. This has provided the minimum salaries to enable them to pursue the venture further.

Since the company officially began on 5 November 2008, Holloway’s team has installed two fully operating prototypes and has proved the product technically. Holloway says he has a new batch of systems arriving this month and that by year-end he will have 20–30 lead users, which will have been chosen partly for their ability to add value and credibility to Artica’s brand – “everyone from schools and local government to the likes of Google and Microsoft,” he hopes.

Pricing will compete directly with conventional air conditioning, at around €100/m2 of office, with independent contractors performing installation. Holloway claims that his system will greatly outlive a normal air-conditioning unit due to having no refrigerants and far fewer moving parts.

Although Holloway acknowledges that “there’s loads of low-energy approaches to this sector currently”, citing everything from chilled beams to ground source heat pumps, he notes “most of these approaches are capital intensive and involve major structural work”. Artica’s unit is “plug and play and can be retrofitted, if necessary sitting neatly alongside legacy air-conditioning units that can be switched off but left embedded in the fabric of the building”.

THE GOOD ENTREPRENEUR
ONE IDEA TO CHANGE THE WORLD

And the winner is ...

After more than 200 entries, The Good Entrepreneur competition — which was created by business and financial news channel CNBC and financial services provider Allianz last year with the aim to identify an entrepreneur with the best eco-business concept that is sustainable, responsible and innovative — finally has a winner.

Mathew Holloway of Artica, supplier of air-conditioning solutions, was found by the judging panel, which included Nani Beccalli-Falco, president and CEO, GE International; Dr Armin Sandhövel, CEO, Allianz Climate Solutions; Reid Hoffman, CEO, LinkedIn.com; Sir David King, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford; and Jean-Philippe Courtois, president, Microsoft International, to have the right idea, business model, vision, personality and leadership required to succeed.

Holloway took home a prize package valued at more than €250,000, which includes financial support, advertising on CNBC and business support from Allianz. Holloway beat two other finalists: Bristol, UK-based Craig White who runs Modcell, a carbon negative homes business that uses renewable materials such as wood, straw and hemp; and Malta-based Marco Cremona, who has developed a water treatment system that avoids pollution and saves 80% of the water consumed.