A Revolution in Air Conditioning

Designed for Sustainability: Superior Comfort. Ultra Efficient. Climate-Friendly. Energy Storage.

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Replaces existing air conditioning units. Delivers extraordinary benefits.

Blue Frontier offers a replacement for the Packaged Rooftop Units that dominate the commercial building air conditioning market. Conventional air conditioners are based on century-old technology, unfit to solve today’s problems. They are a leading cause of blackouts, high electricity prices, and fossil fuel consumption. Our system is smarter, greener, stores energy, and slashes costs.
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> 60%

Reduction in Yearly Electricity Use

> 80%

Reduction in Peak Electricity Demand

> 85%

Reduction in GHG Emissions

Energy Storage

A New Approach to Air Conditioning

At Blue Frontier, our mission is to transform buildings into sustainable, comfortable, and interactive spaces. Our first step towards achieving this goal is the commercialization of a revolutionary air conditioning technology. Blue Frontier’s AC system combines dew-point-style sensible cooling with liquid desiccant dehumidification to reduce electricity use by up to 90% (non-fan). The desiccant is recharged and stored when electricity is the cleanest or lowest cost, and later used to deliver cooling when electricity is dirty or costly. These features enable our system to solve an array of today’s largest sustainability problems — from the Duck Curve to peak load management, from humidity control to integration of intermittent renewable resources.

Liquid Desiccants and Our Cooling Process

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Liquid Desiccants as Breakthrough Energy Storage

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Blue Frontier’s Impact on Electricity Bills

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Meet Our Team

Daniel Betts

Chief Executive Officer

About Daniel

Matt Tilghman

Chief Technology Officer

About Matt

Greg Tropsa

EVP Business Development

About Greg

Matt Graham

VP of Engineering

About Matt

John Hingley

VP of Operations

About John

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Trusted Partners

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Q: How do you achieve such high efficiencies?

Our technology is fundamentally different and more efficient than conventional air conditioning. Both the cooling process and the regeneration process embody novel features to enable multipliers to our
energy input.

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Q: Does your product work in all climates?

The answer is a resounding YES! Our technology works from the tropics (hot and humid) to deserts (hot and dry), and anywhere in between – our technology is not limited to arid locations.

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Q: How does your technology impact climate change?

Blue Frontier’s system tackles the two main offenders of air conditioning: we reduce electricity consumption by over 60% and reduce refrigerant impact by 85%. In addition, our ability to store energy facilitates more renewable use.

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Daniel Betts, Ph.D.

Chief Executive Officer

Daniel Betts is the CEO and co-founder of Blue Frontier. Daniel has worked in energy technology and advanced energy systems space since 1997. This work has spanned R&D, product development, consulting, and executive management of various startups. Prior to Blue Frontier, Dr. Betts was the CEO and CTO of Be Power Tech, an advanced air conditioning and distributed power company, and President of EnerFuel, an Ener1 subsidiary developing next-gen batteries and fuel cells for vehicles and stationary applications. He has also been an engineering and business strategy consultant to several large companies and organizations working in the Cleantech space. Among these are Jabil Circuit, Research Triangle Institute, and multiple leading OEMs in the automotive, engines, and materials handling industry.

Dr. Betts has a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and thermal sciences from the University of Florida. He also holds an MBA from the same school. He holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the George Washington University.

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Matt Tilghman, Ph.D.

Chief Technology Officer

As CTO, Matt sets the technical direction of the company, as well as oversees overall system design. Matt also helps with the detailed design and evaluation of Heat and Mass Transfer Systems, modeling of individual component dynamics, and modeling of overall system performance. Matt is an expert in air conditioning, heat transfer, and thermodynamics.

Prior to his work at Blue Frontier Matt worked at Be Power Tech, and Advantix Systems, both developers of liquid desiccant HVAC systems. While at Advantix Systems, Matt was lead thermodynamicist and experimentalist, in charge of benchmarking and validating system performance. Later at Be Power Tech, Matt served as Principal Engineer where he managed the system architecture, controls, modeling, and testing of a liquid desiccant air conditioner that is powered by the thermal waste heat of a generator.

Matt obtained his B.S. from Princeton University, and his Ph.D. from Stanford University, with concentrations in thermodynamics and heat transfer.

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Greg Tropsa

President

Gregory Tropsa, President, is a seasoned startup professional with more than 25 years of experience in domestic and international business. Mr. Tropsa founded Peak Efficiency, based in Windsor, Colorado, in 2013 to aggregate and qualify energy efficiency and peak load management technologies as megawatt-scale energy and capacity resources. Peak sells these preferred resources to electric utilities under long term contracts. To achieve meaningful megawatt and gigawatt-hour scale, the Company developed a comprehensive device-cloud infrastructure to aggregate energy and demand saving solutions for commercial and industrial customers including dispatch, control, measure, validate, and maintain distributed resources. Peak’s intelligent cloud-based services round out its solution with monitoring, asset health, and automated contract compliance tools. Peak’s proprietary products include field controllers, sensors, device-cloud cellular networks, data storage, measurement, validation, and automated fault detection. Mr. Tropsa is fluent with the legislative, regulatory, and technical nuances of the electrical power and building energy and demand saving solutions, Greg has developed and/or managed the sale and implementation of distributed generation, energy storage, energy efficiency, and peak demand reducing solutions for the past 20 years.

In 2003 Mr. Tropsa co-founded and served as President of Ice Energy. Ice Energy commercialized a high efficiency energy storage technology that is installed behind-the-meter on hundreds of commercial buildings to reduce summer peak demand. The Company developed and implemented a novel business model selling the offset energy and capacity value streams of energy storage to electric utilities under long term agreements. Greg and his team entered into agreements with 25 different utilities throughout North America including the first of its kind, 53 megawatt, utility owned, distributed energy storage capacity and energy contract. In the early years, the Company led the development of technical, legislative, and regulatory framework for energy storage in California.

In 1998 Mr. Tropsa co-founded MegaEnergy to monetize stranded natural gas assets enabled by the expansion of natural gas storage facilities and the deregulation of electricity. Mr. Tropsa and his partners developed several simple cycle peak generation sites, acquired and developed 2 BCF of natural gas property, drilled natural gas wells, permitted, constructed and interconnected gas distribution pipelines and sales terminals.

In 1993 Mr. Tropsa joined Honeywell’s Industrial Process Control Division as a district Sales and Service Manager based in Charlotte, North Carolina. This division of Honeywell sells advanced control and energy saving contract service solutions to the continuous process industry; including power, refining, pulp and paper and specialty chemicals. He was promoted to Director of the Equipment Health Management line of business to develop diagnostics and analytics used to predict changes in equipment health, prior to failure.

Previously, he served as a member of the Board of Directors, Vice-President of Global Operations, and President of the German and UK business units of Industrial Dynamics. Mr. Tropsa joined Industrial Dynamics, a manufacturer of specialty sensors located in Torrance, California, as its Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing following a successful career at Cutler Hammer, which was his first job out of college as a sales engineer for industrial motor controls, sensors, high voltage power bus, and power distribution products.

Mr. Tropsa received a B.S. from Clarkson College of Technology in Potsdam, New York. Greg enjoys skiing, hiking, scuba diving, and is an Eagle Boy Scout.

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Matt Graham

VP of Engineering

Matt Graham is the VP of Engineering for Blue Frontier and is primarily focused on material investigation, mechanical design, and fluid analysis of the system’s HMX devices, and IP development. He has worked on the design of liquid desiccant air conditioners since 2013, starting at Be Power Tech.  Matt has been the lead system designer on projects ranging from fuel cells to air conditioners for nearly three decades and has taken multiple projects from the drawing board to the assembly line. 

Before Blue Frontier and Be Power Tech, Mr. Graham was with EnerFuel was the Director of Product Development. He was responsible for instituting cost reductions, manufacturability, and functional improvements to fuel cell stack and supporting sub-systems in an effort to increase performance and decrease the cost of EnerFuel’s fuel cell products. He also led the programs to develop the company’s next-generation fuel cell stack and its HT-PEM mCHP product for residential and small commercial applications. In 2012 he served as program manager for the successful effort to develop a high-efficiency propane-fed fuel cell system for telecommunications backup power. The resulting prototype was the foundation for EnerFuel’s integrated reformer-based fuel cell system, upon which the mCHP and telecommunications backup power products were based. In addition to the company’s stationary product efforts, he also managed EnerFuel’s Fuel Cell Extended Range Electric Vehicle program, which successfully integrated an HT-PEM fuel cell system and power electronics with an AC Propulsion EV. 

Matt obtained his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park.

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John Hingley

VP of Operations

John Hingley is Vice President of Operations at Blue Frontier and has a broad range of responsibilities assisting the leadership team and managing supporting functions within the business. John is an experienced entrepreneur, business developer and engineer. He was CEO of portable solar power startup Renovagen (UK and USA) for 8 years – taking solar power where it had never gone before. John invented, developed and brought to market the most powerful, easiest to use and fastest to deploy mobile solar hybrid power systems ever – with customers such as UNHCR, UK/FR/NL military, UK DFID, CTBTO, Comcast and Verizon -deploying them in Europe, Middle East, Africa, USA and Asia to provide clean energy in remote locations where solar power was previously impossible to consider. Prior to embarking on his entrepreneurial journey, he spent 6 years in technical business development roles in telecommunications and mobile device testing service businesses, including as Sales Director (Europe) for the California-based startup DeviceAnywhere.

Passionate about decarbonization, John strongly supports “greening the grid”, sustainable transportation and taking clean technology to all corners of the globe so that everyone may benefit. He is a strong believer that through innovative use of technology we can address today’s sustainability challenges in a way which means that we don’t have to give up our modern home comforts or drastically change our lifestyles. This belief immediately drew him to Blue Frontier’s sustainable cooling technology. The prospect of obtaining the comfortable cool environment we all prefer in hot climates – whilst simultaneously helping to increase renewables penetration in the grid (via Blue Frontier’s integrated low-cost energy storage) rather than damaging the environment with the high levels of CO2 emissions from traditional air conditioning – made joining Blue Frontier an easy decision.

John holds Bachelors’ and Masters’ degrees in Engineering from University of Cambridge, UK. He has two granted patents and was named “Innovator of the Year” by Business Green Technology Awards.

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The Blue Frontier air conditioning process is much more efficient than conventional air conditioning, reducing energy use by up to 90%. These extraordinary efficiency gains come from leveraging the phase change of water to create cooling and dehumidification, as well as the way the liquid desiccant is regenerated.

Blue Frontier’s regeneration and cooling processes both have multipliers that increase the system’s efficiency. In terms of the cooling process, our energy input is in the form of concentrated liquid desiccant, which dehumidifies the air. However, once the air is dried, this enables follow-on dew-point-style indirect evaporative cooling. For every 1 ton-hr of dehumidification, this can enable many more ton-hrs of sensible cooling without any additional energy input (other than water). This approach multiplies our energy input by approximately 1.5x in a humid climate like Miami, and by over 10x in an arid climate like Phoenix.

Blue Frontier’s desiccant regeneration process also has a multiplier, known as the “coefficient of performance,” or COP. This is a feature of nearly all heat pumps, however, our coefficient of performance is much higher. Conventional direct expansion air conditioners typically have a COP in the range of 3 to 3.5, while the COP of our heat pump is in the range of 5 to 7. Because we use the power of water evaporation for sensible cooling, we do not need to use the cold side of the heat pump (the evaporator) for air conditioning, which would make low-power, energy-storage operation impossible. As such, we can place the evaporator in the warm humid exhaust air leaving the regenerator. This keeps evaporator temperatures high and compressor lift low, resulting in high efficiencies no matter the ambient conditions. This also enables water recovery, keeping our water use low.

By having high energy multipliers on both the cooling process and the regeneration process, our system’s total COP ranges from about 11 on the low end to over 50 on the high end, which corresponds to energy reductions of 60% and >90%, respectively!

A major downside to conventional vapor compression air conditioners is that their capacity plummets on very hot days – exactly when you need AC the most! And it’s not only their capacity that plunges on hot days but their efficiency too. This is because when the temperature difference between the outdoor condenser and the indoor evaporator, known as “compressor lift” gets too large, the efficiency (and capacity) of the compressor begins to degrade significantly.  

Blue Frontier’s technology does not have this problem. Our desiccant regeneration process is thermally-driven, so it actually becomes more efficient when outdoor temperature increases. Furthermore, our system’s evaporator is an integrated part of the regenerator, so compressor lift is always kept low. This keeps our efficiency and capacity high, even on the hottest days.

Furthermore, while the Blue Frontier system does leverage the evaporation of water to drive the cooling process, our technology bears little resemblance to other evaporative systems whose capacity degrades on humid days – or even worse, ones that add humidity to the indoor space! We use a patented two-step process, technically described as single-channel, double-indirect evaporative cooling technology. The first step, isothermal dehumidification, removes moisture from the air. This is crucial for two reasons. First, it enables our system to provide dehumidification, making it a complete air conditioning package (unlike other evaporative systems). Second, it drops the dew point low enough such that the cooling stage can always reach low temperatures, in the range of 55 to 60 °F, no matter the ambient conditions. This is a feat that no other evaporative-based system can claim.

The table below shows exemplary performance in four distinct climate types. While the BF AC system is a bit more efficient under hot and dry conditions, due to needing to use less desiccant, energy and cost savings are substantial even in extremely tropical climates!

As the temperature rises, so too does the demand for air conditioning, as well as its impact on the environment. According to International Energy Agency, there are about 1.6 billion air conditioning units in service today. By 2030, this number will grow to 5.6 billion. To put the growth into perspective, that means 10 new AC units every second for the next 30 years! The explosive growth for air conditioning worries sustainability experts. Air conditioning increases greenhouse gas emissions through increased energy use, but they also leak harmful refrigerants, which are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. 

Blue Frontier’s climate-friendly air conditioner reduces GHG emissions by:

  • Slashing non-fan air conditioning electricity consumption by up to 90%.
  • Storing renewable power and shifting its use to the late afternoon, eliminating the problematic duck curve and the dispatch of fossil-fueled peaking power plants, exceeding all clean peak standards.
  • Reducing the global warming potential impact of refrigerant by 85%.
  • Blue Frontier uses a fractional amount of low-GWP refrigerant to drive a heat pump that provides heat for desiccant regeneration. Since the desiccant regenerator is separate and not associated with the building’s indoor air cooling process, Blue Frontier is free to use low-GWP refrigerants such as R454B (466 GWP, vs R410a’s 1088 GWP).