CoolPlanet: Energy management software and engineering for industrial decarbonisation

Overview

CoolPlanet began as Crowley Carbon, an engineering business that delivered energy efficiency projects in factories around the world. When the pandemic stopped site work in 2020, the group rebuilt itself around the software it had been using on those projects (The Irish Times). That software is now CoolPlanetOS, sold as a cloud subscription from the company's base at Powerscourt Estate in Enniskerry, County Wicklow.

The company sells three things meant to be bought together: CoolPlanetOS for monitoring and reporting, consulting that turns the data into a decarbonisation plan, and execution, where its own engineers deliver the projects (CoolPlanet). A fourth line, grid services, came with the 2021 purchase of PowerHouse Generation, an Antrim demand response aggregator, and pays Irish sites for cutting demand when the grid is short (Silicon Republic).

Its customers are mostly energy-intensive manufacturers in food and drink, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, semiconductors, plastics and agribusiness, plus some large commercial buildings. Named customers include Louis Dreyfus Company, GE Healthcare, Hilton Food Group, Viterra, Tirlán and Zimmer Biomet (Enterprise Ireland).

Among energy management platforms, CoolPlanet sits closer to an engineering firm than a pure software vendor. Nearly every published result comes from a project where CoolPlanet both measured the plant and changed it: refrigeration, steam, compressed air, heat recovery, CHP, solar and batteries. The software is how it finds the work, proves the savings and keeps them from drifting afterwards. That makes it a strong fit for an operations team that wants an outcome, and a less obvious one for a team that only wants a dashboard to run itself.

Offering

CoolPlanetOS

CoolPlanetOS collects energy and process data from every site into one system. It provides real-time monitoring, multi-site dashboards and benchmarking, dashboards for each site's significant energy users, operational drift analysis and alert rules, which CoolPlanet calls watchers. On top of that sit forecasting, savings estimates built with Monte Carlo simulation, a register of improvement opportunities, a Net Zero Glidepath for planning emissions reductions, and reporting to GRI, TCFD, CSRD and SBTi.

The platform was earlier sold as Clarity, and the pricing tiers still carry that name (The Irish Times). The AWS Marketplace listing publishes the prices, which is rare in this category:

• Monthly tiers from US$1,055 for 100 data points to US$7,717 for 2,000, each with two users, five watchers and one site connection.
• Up to 10% off on a 12-month contract.
• Extra points from US$7.24 each down to US$1.81 at volume, extra users at US$120 a month, watchers at US$0.60 and managed site connections at US$60 a month.
• CoolPlanet 360 carbon accounting at US$149 a month per supplier, or US$1,299 a month for a portfolio.

Consulting and execution

Consulting covers energy audits, net zero roadmaps and project plans. Execution is the engineering: industrial heat pumps, solar, compressed air, refrigeration, steam, CHP and battery storage, from equipment selection and design through installation to monitoring in CoolPlanetOS. CoolPlanet says it can take on any single step or the whole project.

Grid services

Demand response enrols Irish industrial sites in the capacity market, DS3 system services and the integrated single electricity market. When EirGrid signals, the site cuts load or runs backup generation, fuelled with HVO, without anyone on site acting. Under Assets as a Service, CoolPlanet funds, designs and installs heat pumps, batteries or generators at no upfront cost and earns its return by trading their capacity. It reports more than 15 MW on 10-year contracts. Flex by CoolPlanetOS combines site data with market prices to show when load can move.

In 2021 CoolPlanet and SSE Airtricity set up a venture offering the service to Airtricity's industrial customers, with about 80 clients expected to share up to €900,000 over its first 12 months (The Irish Times).

Technology

Getting data in

CoolPlanet installs its data acquisition software on a physical or virtual server at the customer's site, and connects it to whatever controllers, historians and databases the network can reach (FAQ). Where a site has too little sub-metering to see where energy goes, CoolPlanet designs and installs the metering first, and it offers a gap analysis of existing meters before a project starts.

The integration catalogue names 29 systems in six groups:

• building management systems from Schneider Electric, Johnson Controls, Tridium, Mitsubishi Electric, Bosch, Honeywell, Siemens, Trane, Trend and Daikin;
• SCADA and PLC platforms from Mitsubishi Electric, Rockwell Automation, Siemens and AVEVA Wonderware;
• GE, OSI PI and SQL Server historians;
• four meter makers;
• third-party APIs for energy market, electric fleet, EV charging, smart meter and air quality data;
• AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Snowflake data stores.

CoolPlanet describes the platform as data agnostic, takes utility bills as well as sensor data, and builds custom connections for systems not on the list. In practice its case studies show it reading existing SCADA systems: several years of history at a UK brewery, and live response data at an Irish pharmaceutical plant, where ESB metering then validated the result.

CoolPlanet does not publish an API reference, the field protocols its acquisition software speaks (Modbus, BACnet, OPC UA, MQTT or others) or the file formats it accepts. The catalogue names systems, not interfaces, so it does not show which connections are packaged and which are project work.

Hosting and security

CoolPlanetOS is hosted on AWS in the EU. The FAQ lists two-factor sign-in, GDPR compliance and SOC 2. The AWS Marketplace listing adds ISO 27001 certified security management, and says the emissions calculation method is certified by TÜV Rheinland against the GHG Protocol corporate standard and the ISO 14064 series (AWS Marketplace). No certificate, scope statement or audit report is published for any of these, and there is no security page describing encryption, access control, retention or incident handling.

Demand response

For grid services the site's flexible assets respond to EirGrid dispatch signals automatically. At the pharmaceutical plant that meant two generators able to carry the whole site and a 1 MW battery, with the response captured through CoolPlanet's SCADA integration. Participation followed validation tests with EirGrid, and the DS3 capability is reset every six months.

Customers

CoolPlanet publishes more than 20 case studies, most with figures and some with named sites. The named ones:

• Newport Wafer Fab, Wales. A 2.5 MW trigeneration CHP plant feeding two heat exchangers and a 1 MW absorption chiller, plus chiller controls, compressed air leak repairs and variable speed drives, delivered over 2019 and 2020. CoolPlanetOS supplied ISO 50001 dashboards, watchers and a monthly opportunity register. Reported savings: £1,198,782 a year (case study).
• Bulmers, C&C Group's cider plant in Clonmel. A high-temperature heat pump reuses heat from cooling the product to pasteurise it, alongside steam system work and a rooftop solar array supplying about 10% of the plant's electricity. The target is 42% less Scope 1 emissions, about 1,882 tonnes CO2e a year (case study).
• Aliaxis, Spain. An investment-grade audit with temporary metering, then CoolPlanetOS, controls on boilers and compressed air, two chillers and two cooling towers replaced by one of each, and AC drives on the extrusion lines. Electricity use fell 24%, saving €207,097 a year with a 2.2-year payback (case study).
• Dubai Festival City Mall, for Al-Futtaim Engineering. HVAC run on dynamic variables instead of fixed set points, an LED retrofit and optimisation of a district cooling plant serving more than 22 buildings over a 15 km chilled water network. Energy use at the mall fell 26%, with total savings of US$2.7 million (case study).

The anonymous cases are as detailed. At a UK contract brewery CoolPlanet merged three refrigeration systems into one and reworked the boilers and compressed air, saving £285,000 a year with a 2.5-year payback after nine months of work. Monitoring later caught a week in August when the refrigeration plant ran more than 40% less efficiently; the cause was a newly installed valve set wrongly, and it was fixed within days (case study). An Irish pharmaceutical plant earns €163,216 a year from DS3 services and €25,824 from a demand side unit (case study).

Other published results include a Brazilian soybean crusher, a US paper mill, an Australian packaging plant and Westfield Parramatta in Sydney (case studies). Beyond the case studies, CoolPlanet names Louis Dreyfus Company, GE Healthcare, Hilton Food Group, Viterra, Tirlán and Zimmer Biomet as customers (Enterprise Ireland), and in 2020 said its clients included four of the world's eight largest food companies and seven of the eight largest pharmaceutical companies (RTÉ).

Markets

CoolPlanet's home markets are Ireland and the UK, where its engineering teams and its grid services business are based. Its demand response products are built on EirGrid programmes and the integrated single electricity market, so they apply on the island of Ireland only. The engineering and software work reaches much further: published projects are in Spain, Brazil, the United States, the UAE and Australia (case studies), and in 2020 the group said it operated in 26 countries (RTÉ).

It serves four sectors by name: manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, food and beverages, and commercial real estate. The common thread is a large, continuous energy load where process changes pay back quickly.

Three partnerships extend its reach:

• Arcadis. Mission Zero, a strategic alliance with the engineering and consultancy group, pairs CoolPlanet's software with Arcadis design and project delivery under a single contract for large industrial plants, from design through to verified savings (Arcadis; CoolPlanet).
• Climatech Zero. In October 2023 CoolPlanet gave the Australian company exclusive licences for CoolPlanetOS and for its autonomous vehicle operating system in Australia and New Zealand, aimed at mining companies electrifying their light vehicle fleets. The two had worked together since 2018 (CoolPlanet).
• SSE Airtricity. The 2021 demand response venture offered to Airtricity's industrial electricity customers.

For other resellers the partner programme has four levels, from referral through solution and comprehensive partners to managed partners who run the whole customer relationship. Partners get training, deal registration, demo accounts, co-marketing funds and a white-label option. CoolPlanetOS can also be bought through AWS Marketplace.

Company

Norman Crowley founded the business as Crowley Carbon. The company gives 2008 as its founding year (Enterprise Ireland); Crowley Carbon Limited was incorporated in Ireland on 9 November 2009 (SoloCheck). The group now sits under Cool Planet Group Limited, a holding company incorporated in September 2019 and registered at Powerscourt House, Enniskerry, which filed its accounts for 2024 in October 2025 (SoloCheck). In 2021 the group also built electric vehicles, ran education services and was trialling electrification technology for mining vehicles (The Irish Times).

Leadership

Norman Crowley is founder and chair. Alan Keogh, chief executive of Crowley Carbon when it bought PowerHouse Generation in 2021 (Silicon Republic), is chief executive of CoolPlanet (Enterprise Ireland). John MacEnri is chief technology officer and Keith O'Reilly head of product (CoolPlanet).

Funding and results

In February 2020 Tikehau Capital bought a significant minority stake for €31 million, with the London-based Systemiq Incubation also investing (RTÉ; CoolPlanet). Weeks later the pandemic halted about €70 million of clean energy and climate education work. The group lost more than €10 million in 2020 and €6.4 million after tax in 2021 (The Irish Times). Revenue then reached €13.7 million in 2022, up 150%, with a pre-tax loss of €4.9 million, accumulated losses of €28.4 million and net assets of €1 million at the year end. Enterprise Ireland granted €4.1 million in August 2023 (The Irish Times).

Two earlier trading companies have been wound up. Crowley Carbon UK Limited went into compulsory liquidation in January 2022 and was dissolved in January 2026 (Companies House), and Crowley Carbon Limited in Ireland entered liquidation in May 2024 (SoloCheck).

People

The company had 90 staff at the end of 2022 and about 140 in February 2024, when it opened 20,000 square feet of new offices at Powerscourt Estate and announced 150 more jobs over two years (Enterprise Ireland). LinkedIn listed 136 employees in September 2026.