In 1991, the City of Paris awarded CLIMESPACE, a wholly owned subsidiary of ENGIE Group (a French multinational utility company), a 20-year contract to operate and develop its cooling system. However, in April 2022, Fraîcheur de Paris replaced CLIMESPACE as the operator of the district’s cooling network, which is currently one of the largest in the world. Fraîcheur de Paris is co-owned by the ENGIE Group (85%) and Régie autonome des transports parisiens or RATP (15%) and will be responsible for the production, storage, transport, and distribution of the city’s cooling energy for the next 20 years. Integrated into the city’s architecture and completely out of sight, the system meets the cooling requirements of hotels, department stores, offices state buildings, museums, and theatres throughout the city. Moreover, since the cooling network is operated in Paris, it can be cooled by water from the Seine River, thus cooling the city in the summer months while simultaneously improving energy efficiency and reducing CO₂ emissions.
The cooling system involves 153 employees, 10 production sites, and 4 energy storage sites. Approximately 765 customers are connected, representing about 6 million square meters of air conditioning. It utilizes 92 kilometers of underground networking and supplies 490 GWh per year of cooling energy, generating 90 million Euros in revenue. By the end of the contract with the City of Paris in 2042, Fraîcheur de Paris ambitiously plans for the network to cover all the capital’s arrondissements, which will include tripling its length with an additional 158 kilometers and adding 20 new production plants and 10 new storage facilities, to supply cooling to over 3,000 customers. The previous cooling system primarily covered service-sector buildings. However, in the future, the new network will extend to an additional 300 buildings, dedicated to new customers sensitive to high temperature such as hospitals, childcare centers, retirement homes, as well as small businesses.