As the climate warms the demand for air conditioning increases, this demand requires increased power use which in turn causes the climate to warm further. Now a new material developed by researchers from Stanford University may help to end that cycle, or at least slow it down.

The designers of the new material hope to use the coldness of space as a resource in the same way that solar panels use the warmth of the sun as a resource. In addition to reflecting sunlight, which causes buildings to warm less than they would otherwise, the material turns existing heat into infrared radiation. That radiation is transferred through the atmosphere directly into space without warming the atmosphere as it passes.

“This is very novel and an extraordinarily simple idea. As a result of professor [Shanhui] Fan’s work, we can now [use radiative cooling], not only at night but counter-intuitively in the daytime as well,” said Eli Yablonovitch, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley who directs the Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science in a statement.

The material is made from 7 layers of silicon dioxide and hafnium oxide on top of a thin layer of silver. The resulting material is only 1.8 microns thick, which means that it would take more than 12,000 layers stacked on top of one another before it was one inch thick. The internal structure of the material is designed to radiate heat at a precise frequency so that it passes harmlessly into space. In tests the material showed a cooling rate of about 15 percent, which means that it would cool a building from 100 degrees Fahrenheit to 85 degrees without using any energy at all.

“This photonic approach gives us the ability to finely tune both solar reflection and infrared thermal radiation,” said Linxiao Zhu, doctoral candidate in applied physics and a co-author of the paper which appears in the journal Nature.

There are still a few obstacles left before the new material could be put to use. First, a way must be found to transfer existing heat from the building to the panel. Heat is transferred in one of three ways conduction, convection and radiation. When you place a pan on a hot stove, the heat is conducted into the pan and whatever is inside. Convection uses fluid or air to transfer heat. The warm air from a heater or the hot water in a shower uses convection. Radiation moves heat in the form of infrared light, the Sun radiates the Earth using radiation. Heat would have to be moved to the panel using one or more of these methods before the material could radiate the heat into space.

The second problem is manufacturing. The existing prototype of the material is about the size of a small pizza and large quantities of it would be needed to cool buildings. Finally, a method would have to be found to turn the material “off” in cooler climates. Cooling warm buildings in the winter would be counterproductive in terms of saving energy.

However, if these obstacles can be overcome could considerably reduce the demand for energy in a warming climate.