While dry cooling systems excel in water conservation compared to wet cooling systems, their performance at high ambient temperatures remains subpar. This study explores a novel latent heat storage module, acting as a water-free pre-cooler to lower temperature of ambient air into the dry cooling system. Four module designs were constructed, based on a pervious concrete and a custom-made inorganic phase change material, calcium chloride hexahydrate, with stable latent heat over 1,000 freeze–thaw thermal cycles. This marks the first-time integration of inorganic phase change material into pervious concrete through micro- and macro-encapsulation. A forced-air heat transfer apparatus was used to evaluate the modules’ thermal performance and heat transfer characteristics, revealing substantial thermal capacity increases of the modules- from 20.0 to 49.2 kWh/m3 charging and 20.3 to 43.6 kWh/m3 in discharging. The module with highest heat storage capacity investigated in this work is the pervious concrete module with micro-encapsulated phase change material and cast around a metal tube array filled with phase change material, which consistently reduces temperature of the airflow at 35 °C and 0.86 m/s by an average of 2 ℃ over three hours, showing potential as a pre-cooler in dry cooling applications.