Sarah Zupko

Founder & CEO @PopMatters | 🇬🇧 🇵🇱 🇸🇪 🇪🇺 | Creator. Editor. Writer. Historian. Artist | ⚽️@ChelseaFC @England 🎓@UChicago 🇺🇦#SlavaUkraini

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

Very interesting. International publications like @PopMatters should probably publish in British English. Hmmm….

[Amazing Maps @amazingmap]

British or American? The English Taught in Schools Worldwide

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

This was Chicago when my grandmother was a teenager. Michigan Avenue. Tribune Tower, where I worked, had already been built.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This was Chicago during the 1930s

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

@francesafetytra Chicago is buying 100 of these chairs for the lakefront by Buckingham Palace. I love that Chicago is looking to Paris for ideas. Now, they need to get air and noise pollution under control like Paris has.

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

Jazda Maja! 🇵🇱🎾

[Roland-Garros @rolandgarros]

Where dreams are made… or broken 💥

Chwalinska 🆚 Andreeva ⚡️

#RolandGarros

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

@rolandgarros Jazda Maja! 🇵🇱🎾

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

Big cities need to be a lot more like Paris in tackling climate change.

[Yohan @yohaniddawela]

The French hate air conditioning.

So Paris built a 120-kilometre machine under its streets for producing cold.

It’s called Fraîcheur de Paris, and it does for summer heat what district heating did for winter: centralise the problem.

Instead of every museum, office, hotel, hospital and shop bolting its own cooling plant onto the building, Paris moves cold through pipes.

The network sends water chilled to 2 to 4°C through buried supply lines. The water enters a connected building, absorbs heat through an exchange station, then returns at 12 to 14°C to be cooled again.

It essentially functions with two pipes. One carries the cold out, the other carries heat back.

The production plants cool the circuit from 12°C to 4°C. Some sites use the Seine as a heat sink. In colder periods, the system can use the river’s own temperature for free cooling, which means the machines work less and the electricity demand drops. The Seine water doesn’t become the building water. It stays separate, passing temperature across heat exchangers.

The scale is pretty strange when you see it written down though.

It's got 15 production sites, 4 storage sites, 120 km of underground network with 924 subscribers. This has resulted in 7 million square metres cooled, and 493 GWh of cooling sold.

A cold utility running beneath one of the densest cities in Europe.

The Forum des Halles has been cooled this way since 1979. The Louvre since 1986. Galeries Lafayette, Opéra Garnier, Hôtel de Ville, Station F, La Samaritaine and the National Assembly all sit on the same idea. Tourists stand in the Louvre looking at paintings while a municipal cold loop does part of the dull work below ground.

The boring part is the breakthrough.

Cold can be stored at night in chilled water or ice, then used during daytime peaks. The network is monitored from a control room with more than 125,000 control points. A delivery station inside a building takes 5 to 7 times less space than a standalone cooling installation and avoids the roof and façade clutter that turns cities into compressor farms.

That matters because conventional air conditioning solves heat by moving it somewhere nearby. In a dense city, thousands of private machines mean thousands of outdoor units rejecting heat into streets, courtyards and roofs, plus refrigerants, noise, vibration and maintenance spread across every building.

Paris’s public cooling network has a stated coefficient of performance of 4, against 3 for a wet standalone system and 2 for a dry standalone system. Against an equivalent set of autonomous installations, Fraîcheur de Paris says the network gives 100% higher energy efficiency, 35% less electricity use, 90% fewer refrigerant-fluid emissions and 50% lower CO2 emissions.

The climate backdrop is the real reason this exists.

Paris ran a full crisis exercise called “Paris at 50°C” in 2023. Météo-France’s 2050 reference trajectory for France points to heatwave days becoming five times more frequent, hot nights rising sharply in urban centres, and some local extremes around 48°C becoming possible.

The city signed a 20-year concession in 2022 with Fraîcheur de Paris, owned 85% by ENGIE and 15% by RATP. The contract is worth a projected €2.4 billion. The plan is to extend the network by 158 km by 2042, add 20 production plants and 10 storage sites, and reach more than 3,000 subscribers, including hospitals, nurseries, schools and care homes.

This is basically the infrastructure version of admitting that summer is becoming a public systems problem...

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

@CFC__Women McCabe has been a Chelsea fan since childhood, and I think most of her family support the Blues too. She’s closing in on the later stages of her career and moving to her favorite club before she retires. It makes perfect sense to me.

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

@ChelsTransfer @MailSport Living in London vs. living in Newcastle. Not a difficult choice, especially for an international player.

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

@Chicago_History Blackberry and cherry. Always one of the two.

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

@CFCPys @SimonJones_DM Here we go again with the silly stuff. I love AIK, but the Swedish league isn’t comparable to the top European leagues.

If Chelsea are buying from another league, it should be Spain, France, and Germany, or one of the South American leagues.

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

@ezekielbaiye @FabrizioRomano Please. Any Arsenal player would move to Real Madrid if they had a chance. No football player turns that down unless they are Barca.

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

@ConnCFC Enzo isn’t as great as he thinks he is. Madrid can get better.

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

Stunning. I need to get back to the opera. It’s been too long.

[Architecture & Tradition @archi_tradition]

Europe treated opera houses like palaces.

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

@nexta_tv Mexico should be considered as well.

[createstreets @createstreets]

It is one of the great paradoxes of our age that as we have got richer, our streets have got poorer

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

❤️

[The Tennis Letter @TheTennisLetter]

Maja Chwalinska has changed her life at this year’s Roland Garros.

Her total career earnings before Roland Garros:

$864,030.

What she’s earned at this tournament:

$1,624,000.

Because the players don’t get the money til after the tournament, she was worried she wouldn’t be able to cover her costs for a hotel as she went further and further in the draw.

Polish company OSHEE had to step in and pay for the rest of her hotel fees.

It’s nothing short of heartwarming to see this happening to such a humble person who has overcome her share of struggles.

She overcame a battle with depression and stopped playing tennis entirely for a period to take care of her mental health.

She wasn’t sure if she’d ever come back to this sport.

Absolutely unreal story. 🥹

🇵🇱❤️

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

@Chicago_History Um, how did this individual ever get a girlfriend? Yikes.

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

@ATRightMovies Dozens. All I see are a bunch of Americans and Daniel Day Lewis. Tom Hanks? 🤣

[Sarah Zupko @PopSarah]

@TheRickWilson @TheRealThelmaJ1 What a closet case.

[Rick Wilson @TheRickWilson]

Happy Pride! 🏳️‍🌈