Is An Air-Conditioning Revolution Coming To Europe?

If you are reading this when the blinds are drawn against some other heat and wonder if it is finally time to buy an air conditioner, you are not alone. At the end of June, when the temperature rose above 40 degrees Celsius across Europe, consumers in France they forced their way stores to get portable fans and ACs before they sell. Events like this can become very common. Like the world is hotthe demand for refrigeration is increasing all over the world. The International Energy Agency (IEA) they predict two-thirds of households could have AC by 2050.

Politicians are turning ACs into their own weapon many cultural wars. To the right of Marine Le Pen he promised to release the cooler in France if his party comes to power, while the British Conservatives vowed to roll over net-zero regulations that prohibit the installation of AC in new construction. On the left, the argument is that cooling is especially important let the rich benefit and not those who need it most. It would also lock Europe out of the strong cold front seen in the US and Asia. So far, only round 20 percent Europeans have AC at home (it’s normal 4 percent in the UK), compared to about 90 percent in the US, where electricity is much cheaper.

In Europe, air conditioning is no longer just about comfort. It helps adults to be productive because of high temperatures, and children they work harder in poorly ventilated schools. It helps people shake your head when the air is still very hot after sunset. It can even save lives. One research group comparison that air conditioners prevented nearly 200,000 premature deaths in people over the age of 65 in 2019 alone.

Europe is getting hotter than any other continent, and countries that used to have very hot climates are now getting hotter and hotter. Research by Nicole Miranda and her colleagues at the University of Oxford it shows that countries such as the UK, Switzerland, Norway, and Finland could see significant increases in heating and cooling needs if global temperatures reach 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.

“We’re going to need more cooling to protect people,” says Miranda, senior lecturer in engineering and mitigation at the university. “The question is how to deliver it in an efficient, equitable, and smart way. Not by buying inefficient, energy-guzzling ACs.”

June’s high temperatures provided a foreshadowing of what was to come. In northern Europe, houses and offices built to keep warm during the long winters were turned into ovens. A recent report by the UK’s Climate Change Committee has warned that by the middle ages, more than 90 percent existing buildings can be overheated in extreme temperatures. Even in the far south, centuries-old structures—such as thick stone walls, whitewashed walls, blinds and small windows to block the sun—are coming to an end. People in Europe are already tired of extreme heat.

But simply adding more air conditioners is not the real answer—not in the current situation. Because air conditioning is built on a surprising fact: The machines that keep us cold are also warming the planet. The electricity they consume already counts for approx 3 percent of greenhouse gases worldwide, slightly more than the airline industry. “We expect cooling to be one of the main drivers of global electricity growth, along with data centers,” says Fabian Voswinkel, an energy policy expert at the IEA. With new units being installed worldwide every minute, the demand for electricity for space cooling could more than triple by 2050.

Solar energy it will help reduce emissions, but it won’t eliminate the bad reputation of air conditioners. Conventional ACs still work a century later: refrigerants circulate between water and air to extract heat from rooms and waste it outside. Manufacturers continue to improve technology, but many refrigerators remain difficult. Fluorinated gasesfor example, they have a global warming potential many times greater than CO₂ if released into the atmosphere. Therefore the EU established a laws in 2024 to phase them out. “In the next few years, air conditioners and heat pumps that use this gas will not even be sold here”, says Voswinkel. But other gases bring their products: Propane is highly flammable, while ammonia is toxic.