I think that cooling using water as a refrigerant could become the benchmark technology for industrial cold production.
Alpinov X's mission is to generate cold with an environmental quality and energy efficiency far superior to anything currently available on the market.
The start-up was created by three former colleagues driven by the ambition to innovate in cold production using water as a refrigerant. Following the success of an initial demonstrator, they set up the company in 2007.
Today, conventional refrigeration units produce cold using perfluorinated fluids, which are chemical refrigerants (1,000 times more polluting than exhaust gases). Water is a highly efficient natural refrigerant, but its different properties from chemical fluids modify conventional operating habits.
In 2025, Alpinov X is offering the 4th generation of refrigeration units, a functional appliance that meets market standards in terms of power and functionalities. At the end of the year, we will be rolling it out in the Paris region on a cooling network with the help of ENGIE.
Today, Alpinov X has 23 employees and has raised €22 million. 2025 is devoted to the industrialisation of the solution, and 2026 will be the year in which our refrigeration unit comes to market.
Chemical refrigerants have a Global Warming Potential (GWP) much higher than that of CO₂ production alone. In addition to the production and use of these fluids, there is also energy consumption. This will soon exceed 15% of the world's electricity for cold production alone. Replacing these chemical fluids with water is therefore much more compatible with an environmental approach, which is a guarantee of corporate social responsibility.
Although water is a little more complicated to use, it is a refrigerant whose performance levels are far superior to all others, whether chemical or natural, such as ammonia, a natural - but extremely toxic - refrigerant. Water is non-toxic, non-polluting and non-flammable, and offers superior performance levels, and therefore greater energy efficiency, with percentages ranging from 10% to 30% depending on the case.
In addition to these two arguments is the simplicity of use, unlike the use of chemical refrigerants, which involves a great deal of maintenance, administrative and technical management, and requires servicing leading to service interruptions. This is not the case for water.
To sum up, the main innovative advantages of using water to replace chemical refrigerants are simplicity of use, energy savings and environmental benefits.
We are the only company to have developed this water-based cold production technology on sufficient power volumes to make it commercially attractive in our markets.
Our ambition is to showcase our disruptive technology. To do this, we'll be bringing along various key components in the cold production cycle, which will enable us to outline water compression.
To produce cold, we operate an evaporation-compression-condensation system in a closed vacuum circuit. The complexity lies in compressing water, because it is considered to be incompressible. That's why we've developed our own compressor, which we'll be presenting at Vivatech.
We'll be showcasing some magnificent components to pique visitors' curiosity and explain how our solution works.
Being present on the ENGIE stand is a guarantee that you will be able to meet a maximum number of people.
These exchanges have a number of objectives: to clarify customers' needs, to identify markets in which we could operate, to gather feedback from the field and to improve the quality of communication and information provided.
This will be an opportunity to talk about our solution and to gauge the interest shown in it by the people we talk to. So far, we've seen a great deal of interest in our solution, and we believe that the opportunity to challenge it at this general exhibition will be very rewarding for us.
We're now entering the marketing phase, and the more precise we can be in what we offer and what we say, the greater our chances of success.
Today, we know that our refrigeration unit meets needs. We now want to go into greater depth to find out about secondary needs, usage habits, and drivers of decisions and use.
In 2025, we have focused on industrialisation, to determine which refrigeration units are best suited to each market and under what conditions they can be marketed to meet the challenge of 2026.
Our next challenges will be to expand our product catalogue and continue to improve our offering in the data center, district cooling network and HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) markets.
All start-ups that have become solid companies have gone through phases of development, then product improvement, with a level of maturity that progresses over time. This is part of the challenge we face to ensure the company's long-term future: to produce refrigeration units that are perfectly suited to their market, economically viable and benefit from optimised operation.
We want customers to see our refrigeration unit as an economically and strategically superior solution to that of our competitors.
Cooling requirements continue to rise sharply, both for comfort and for industrial processes. At the same time, global regulations are becoming increasingly stringent in terms of environmental impact. The operating costs of conventional refrigeration units are increasingly high due to quotas on chemical fluids and energy consumption. All the indicators are green for us, and our technology will become increasingly important as our products evolve.
To sum up, in the medium term I think that cooling using water as a refrigerant could become the benchmark technology for industrial cold production. Subsequently, experience and miniaturisation will enable us to reach new markets.
To find out more about Alpinov X, come and meet them at Viva Technology from 11 to 14 June 2025, on the ENGIE stand, J39, Porte de Versailles, Paris.
You can also contact them via their website: https://alpinovx.com/
