Q. How will you mitigate the impact of your technology on the wildlife and environment of the Arctic?
A. Real Ice will be designing our technology with potential impacts to environment and wildlife in mind to strive to design a scalable device that will go unnoticed by wildlife and focuses on eliminating negative impacts on the environment during operation.
How will you make sure you have no impact?
Real Ice is seeking to utilise technology already in-use today to reduce the time needed to implement a renewable powered solution to Arctic sea ice melt. There are water pumps already in use today to generate ice for a variety of recreational and commercial purposes (such as platforms for oil rigs, ice pathways in Arctic regions & public ice rinks), although these are diesel powered.
The innovation brought forward by Real Ice is in the combination of pumping technology, already used by many today, with the advancements made in the renewables and clean energy sector. We are using this to create a system that can be run solely from renewable energy sources and our primary challenge is to demonstrate the capability to scale this methodology. By doing this, we will encourage governments, large industrial partners and local communities to join us in shaping the way that this could benefit all life in the Arctic.
At every stage of our R&D process, Real Ice aims to work in collaboration with institutions and local communities to ensure that appropriate measures have been taken to reduce the impact on the wildlife and environment. It is important to us that the public and indigenous peoples' have been engaged meaningfully when proposing to conduct work on land owned by communities. Following rules of engagement set out by governments & local councils will ensure that we prepare for engagement correctly and ultimately provide a comprehensive impact assessment when preparing for operations in remote Arctic regions.