Under Pressure
Climate Bingo Part 1 – What does refrigerating food, heating homes, cooling data centers, and electrifying vehicles all have in common? If you said compressors, consider your climate bingo achieved!
Compressors are the hidden workhorse behind electric heating and cooling, and they play a crucial role in a variety of industries and everyday life. Their job is simple but demanding: move heat from one place to another. That could be removing heat from the inside of your fridge to keep it cool, or moving heat into your home on a cold day.
The effort it takes to move heat is called lift. It’s the temperature difference between where you’re moving heat from and where you’re moving it to. The bigger that difference, the harder the compressor has to work. Consider the lift needed for a residential heat pump to absorb heat from freezing cold outside air and then lifting it to room temperature. That’s a big lift! But tough challenges mean big opportunities.
What’s scroll got to do with it?
Compressors have existed for over a century, and a large variety of them exist today. Among them is the scroll compressor, which dominates today’s HVAC markets. Invented in 1905, scroll compressors weren’t widely adopted until after World War II, when advances in precision machining made them practical to manufacture. Scroll compressors took over because they’re compact, quiet, efficient at their design point, and relatively inexpensive to mass-produce.
But every design has its limits. Scroll compressors work best within a narrow temperature range. When conditions deviate from their sweet spot, like during a cold winter or hot summer day, their efficiency drops fast. That can push performance so low that it’s using more energy than it’s delivering. You see this everywhere: your electric vehicle’s range drops in half in cold weather; the power grid seriously struggles to meet peak demand every summer; refrigerated tractor trailers carry frozen food at night during heat waves.
To fully electrify global heating and cooling, compressors must maintain efficiency over a much wider range of operating temperatures.
Enter, Evari
Climate Bingo Part 2 – What links compressors, NASA, and emissions impact? Prizes for those who guessed Evari.
Clean Energy Ventures led an investment in Evari because they are commercializing oil-free turbocompressors that deliver MUCH greater efficiency across an extremely wide range of temperatures. A drastic improvement over today’s scroll compressors.
The question was not “does this technology work?” It has already proven itself in some of the harshest environments imaginable. It was originally developed by Evari’s partner, Creare LLC, for NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense and is currently operating in many space and long-duration missions. The challenge? How do we take this highly customized, hand-built, tightly toleranced technology and make it mass-manufacturable so the best compressor technology can be used in home heat pumps, electric vehicles, cold transport, and household appliances.
Evari’s breakthrough lies in re-engineering the technology for mass-production. Through a redesign for manufacturability and innovative precision manufacturing techniques, Evari has made it possible to produce these high-speed, oil-free turbocompressors at a cost that will be competitive with scrolls—unlocking the potential to replace them at commercial scale.
Team and Mission
Evari is led by Steve Walker, a serial entrepreneur whose vision is to bring aerospace-grade performance, quality, and reliability to the energy systems we rely on every day. Evari’s team blends deep technical expertise with a strong track record in domestic manufacturing. They maintain a close partnership with Creare, leveraging its four decades of experience in turbomachinery design and manufacturing.
Evari is supported by Chris Kmetz, former CTO and Senior Vice President at Carrier Corporation, who serves as an independent board director, and John Santoleri, CEV Venture Partner, who represents CEV on the board and brings extensive experience from Warburg Pincus and NYSERDA.
With the right team, partners, and technology, Evari is positioned to unlock the next frontier of high-performance, low-cost heating and cooling. CEV believes Evari’s innovation can enable cumulative emissions reductions exceeding 2.5 gigatons of CO₂ equivalent by 2050, all while manufacturing domestically and making affordable, all-electric heating and cooling possible anywhere in the world.
