Air Conditioner (AC) use is expected to explode over the next three decades. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts the number of home AC units to increase nearly 4-fold by 2050. AC adoption in the developing world is a promising sign of an improved standard of living, though there are rightful concerns about the environmental impact of more space cooling.
But there’s good news: there is a viable net-zero path toward cooling the world relying on existing technologies to offset the new units.
The Real Reason for AC Increases
I live in a temperate climate and used my Air Conditioner only ten days in the past year. Five of those days were hot enough to kill. Even in down-right cold areas, Air Conditioners (ACs) still greatly improve quality of life.
Over the past few years, there have been several pop-sci articles in high-profile magazines using the same IEA projections that I use here but focused on the irony that space cooling contributes to climate warming. They usually imply a feedback loop where global temperatures are driving ACs use while AC use increases climate change in a death spiral.
This, thankfully, is not accurate. Climate change is not the primary driver of increased AC use — improved equipment affordability is. Here’s a graph from IEA showing the percentage of homes with AC ownership by country as of 2016: