I'm not qualified to evaluate how plausible this is, but if it does actually work out it could be a huge boost in multiple ways. Air conditioning accounts for somewhere around 10% of US energy usage [1] and probably more in southern areas. Cutting that by a third is a lot. Not to mention the potential range extension for BEVs - in some of my BEV testing earlier this year, HVAC cut range by around 20% (note this wouldn't necessarily help much for heating, which is usually a bigger range impact).