Discussion keeps the world turning.
This is Roundtable.
You're listening to Roundtable. I'm Steve Hatherly today with Yishan and Feifei.
Coming up, we're all conditioned to crank up the air conditioning when the mercury hits 35 degrees because that is hot.
But what if that's the old way of thinking?
In Eastern China, one city is flipping that script.
Residents in Xuzhou aren't blasting compressors,
they're cooling their homes with cold water pumped from an abandoned coal mine deep underground.
No heat sent out to the streets, no strain on the power grid,
just a clever low-carbon rethink of how we stay comfortable.
We'll learn about that.
When summer heat pushes temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius, most of us reach for the air conditioner.
But in Xuzhou in East China's Jiangsu province, some residents are staying cool without turning on the AC at all.
So what's the secret?
Cold water from an abandoned coal mine deep underground,
transformed into a low-carbon cooling system that can keep homes comfortable even in the hottest months.
So, could old industrial sites become a new source of clean energy?
And is centralized cooling maybe the future of staying comfortable in a warming world?
Feifei and Yishan, we talked about air conditioning on the show within the last two months on Roundtable
in the context of Europe and the heat wave that Europe was going through