An underground cooling system chills the Louvre and other sites in Paris.
Laurent Le Guedart, heritage director of the Louvre, which doesn’t use air-conditioning. The cooling system uses renewable energy by pumping icy water from the Seine through a labyrinth of underground pipes.
By Thomas Adamson and Nico Garriga (Associated Press)
PARIS – The Mona Lisa may maintain her famously enigmatic smile because she benefits from one of Paris’ best-kept secrets: An underground cooling system that’s helped the Louvre cope with the sweltering heat that has broken temperature records across Europe.
The little-known “urban cold” network snakes unsuspecting beneath Parisians’ feet at a depth of up to 98 feet, pumping out icy water through 55 miles of labyrinthine pipes, which is used to chill the air in over 700 sites. The system, which uses electricity generated by renewable sources, is the largest in Europe – and chugs on around the clock with a deafening noise totally inaudible above ground.
Paris’ City Hall has now signed an ambitious contract to triple the size of the network by 2042 to157 miles). It would make it the largest urban cooling system in the world. The new contract intends to help the city to both adapt to and combat the threat of global warming. Many parts of Europe hit 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in July.
The city is extending the cooling network to hospitals, schools, and metro stations over the next two decades. It’s unclear how much of the system will be operational by the time of the Paris Olympics in 2024, but it’s possible the systems will be used in several Olympic sites.
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Unbeknownst to millions of tourists, the piping currently cools the City of Light’s most emblematic sites, such as the Louvre and the Quai Branly Museum. It might even help cool the tempers of agitated lawmakers as it is used to drop temperatures in the National Assembly.
The scheme is operated by the joint-venture company Fraicheur de Paris – 85% owned by the state’s French energy company EDF and the rest by public transport operator RATP. The company’s officials tout its benefits for the entire French capital.
“If all [Parisian] buildings get equipped with autonomous installations [such as air-conditioning], it will gradually create a very significant urban ‘heat island’ effect,” said Maggie Schelfhaut of Fraicheur de Paris, referring to the increased heat in cities due to less vegetation, which cools, and more urban infrastructure, which absorbs the sun’s rays.
But Schelfhaut said that the pipe network could make the whole of Paris one degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) cooler than if autonomous installations were put up across the city.
“One degree less in the city center is a lot,” she added.
Three of the 10 high-tech cooling sites lie on the Seine river and are accessed by a retractable spiral staircase barely visible from street level – in something resembling the lair of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
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