During a short heatwave earlier this summer, our London office was packed as employees flooded into the office for respite. On the second day, they still came to escape the heat, this time bringing jumpers with them as the office was too cold.
With temperatures rising, air conditioning installations are soaring. Unchecked, this could be an environmental disaster. If we use fossil fuels to power our aircon, then the planet will get hotter, and we will need it more. The energy and environmental bill for cooling is rising.
The good news is that, in the UK, solar panels produce electricity at the roughly the same time of day that it’s needed by aircon. But in hotter climates aircon is needed 24 hours, and to meet rising aircon demand we’ll need a lot more solar everywhere.
There’s clearly growing demand for aircon, but contrast this to the limited willingness to install heat pumps.
It isn’t that people are willing to pay for coolness but not for heat.
Aircon provides an immediate fix to an immediate issue for the consumer, whereas heat pumps offer the same heat already provided by gas boilers, often at a higher cost and inconvenience, with only the promise of broad environmental benefits in the future.
Demand for aircon will become unavoidable, as cities will become unliveable without it. The challenge is how we do this in an environmentally responsible way.
We need more efficient units, better insulation, better designed homes and offices, and we need to integrate aircon into the energy system to better match renewable energy generation, and to reduce peak demand.
