Energy efficient, sustainable technologies for cooling and heating represent major pillars of the megatrends resource efficiency and globalization of technologies. Cooling and heating cycles, using renewable energies or waste heat rather than conventionally generated electricity, contribute to sustainably address issues like industrial or comfort cooling with a substantially reduced carbon footprint. In this context, absorption chillers or heat pumps represent a promising technology. However, working pair related drawbacks such as crystallization, corrosion, and instability limit the market penetration. This contribution indicates how new working pairs based on ionic liquids can eliminate a number of state-of-the-art drawbacks and thereby allow leveraging unused energetic potentials in a sustainable manner.