To One Degree or Another
Air conditioning is not really a luxury, but the world might have to ration it
I was a little surprised to read how controversial the idea of air conditioning is in modern day Europe. Sure, this is the same place where you have to ask for ice with your soft drink, and where you will grudgingly be given one cube. But it’s hot, man. My wife and I attended the 2022 Women’s Euro football tournament in the UK. Temperatures exceeded 100 F, and our hotels were not air conditioned. The Met Office acknowledges this “new normal.” France isn’t faring any better. Yet a sizable fraction of the European population resists expanding the use of air conditioning. One worry is that heat islands, created from the exhaust of hot air constantly being blown outside—the price of cooling interior spaces—may actually cause more misery than the air conditioners alleviate. Heat islands are a real problem, to be sure.
A blanket refusal to condition indoor air as a matter of policy or principle is not a reasonable approach. Extreme heat is deadly. Even non-lethal levels of heat can sap worker productivity and force schools to close. These are real economic consequences that must be weighed against the costs of climate control. The tradeoff is nevertheless sobering, if not measured in human comfort, then at least measured in energy. Nearly 90% of US households have air conditioning systems, and their usage accounts for around 12% of household energy consumption. In July 2020, the peak month for US energy and air conditioning usage according to the latest US EIA Residential Energy Consumption Survey, Americans burned through roughly 150 TWh. That’s equivalent to 150,000 GWh, which is in turn equal to 202 conventional 1 GW nuclear power plants operating 24 hours a day for each of the 31 days of July. Twelve percent of that amounts to 24 of those hypothetical 1 GW plants dedicated exclusively to keeping us cool. The actual sources of our 150 TWh total electricity supply in July 2020 were around 43% natural gas, 16% coal, 19% nuclear, and 21% renewable.
Even under the most optimistic of scenarios, a reinvigorated nuclear power industry cannot meet the grand aspirations of AI data centers for more electricity. Our energy production mix is probably not going to change too much in the near future. The mix does vary from country to country, but the overall conclusion will hold: Big Tech is angling for every bit of juice we can generate and will be in a heated (no pun intended) competition for those resources with soaring global demand for air conditioning. We in the US account for 4% of global population. If everyone on earth were to begin using as much air conditioning at the peak of summer as Americans do today, the world would have to dedicate 450 TWh in new gas, coal, nuclear and renewable power capacity per month, to delivering enough cooling—before we would even be able to talk about supplying new data centers! For reference, annual global electric generation capacity expanded by 1,200 TWh in 2024. Prioritizing this sudden additional global cooling load would require commandeering all new electric generating capacity everywhere for four and a half years while foregoing all other new uses of power.
So, I guess the world may need to adopt a more French attitude after all. Which is perfectly fine so long as it includes French food, French wine, and the French Open. Just bring a parasol. And feel free to commiserate with your new chatbot companion.