Railway communication rooms need constant cooling, and that eats power. A WIPO GREEN project in Beijing paired China Railway Beijing Group with Beijing Anxing High Tech to install phase change material (PCM) storage in equipment rooms. The passive thermal storage absorbs heat during the day and releases it at night, cutting compressor workload and keeping rooms near 22°C during outages. Independent trial data over six months showed a 17% average drop in energy use per room, from 729.75 kWh to 602.23 kWh monthly. That works out to about 1,530 kWh and roughly 0.97 metric tons of CO2 saved per room per year. The system also buys time if air conditioning fails, which matters for signaling and dispatching across more than 4,700 kilometers of rail lines. Technology matching came through the WIPO GREEN Acceleration Project with local coordination from the Bluetech Clean Air Alliance. The case is a practical example of low-carbon retrofit for critical infrastructure: better resilience, lower operating cost, and measurable emissions reduction.
