India’s race to stay cool will make the world hotter
BEHROR: Ratan Kumar once battled India’s brutal summers with damp bedsheets and midnight baths. Now he is among millions upon millions of Indians using air conditioning (AC) — helping make the world hotter still.
With India’s AC market expected to explode from 30 million to a billion units by 2050, the world’s second-most populous country could become the planet’s top user of electricity for cooling.
India is already the numberthree spewer of greenhouse gases, burning through 800 million tonnes of coal every year — and the predicted AC boom could mean the country would have to triple its electricity production to meet demand, experts say.
But for the hundreds of millions of Indians enduring scorching, even deadly, summers, the air conditioners are a godsend.
“Summers make our life miserable,” said Kumar, a 48-yearold laundryman earning US$225 (RM932) a month, who this year installed an AC unit in his tworoom house here in the bakinghot desert state of Rajasthan.
“Sleeping for few hours is a struggle after a day’s hard work,” the father-of-two said.
“I am not rich but we all aspire to a comfortable life.”
Vast swathes of India endure a gruelling four-month long summer, and the mercury has been inching ever higher in recent years.
In 2016, the Earth’s hottest on record, temperatures in the Indian town of Phalodi soared to 51°C, the highest recorded in India.
The brutal heat can melt tarmac on the roads and puts millions of people at risk, with nearly 2,500 victims perishing from sunstroke in 2015.
Currently just five per cent of Indian households are equipped with AC, compared with 90 per cent in the United States and 60 per cent in China, up from virtually zero 30 years ago.
But India’s AC market is catching up fast, seeing double-digit growth in the last decade as incomes rise and electricity supplies become more reliable.
“It’s no longer a luxury product but a necessity,” said Kanwal Jeet Jawa, India head of Japanese manufacturer Daikin, whose factory in Rajasthan churns out 1.2 million AC units per year.
“ACs increase productivity and life expectancy. Everyone deserves an AC,” he said.
The irony is that as humans try to stay cool, the refrigerants inside AC units and the generation of electricity needed to power the appliances are exacerbating global warming.
In addition, studies — including by the World Health Organisation and UN-Habitat — show that the heat-generating motors inside AC units can themselves push up temperatures in urban areas, where the appliances are widely used, by a degree or more.
As demand grows, the amount of energy consumed globally by AC units could triple by 2050, requiring new electricity capacity equivalent to the combined current capacity of the US, the EU and Japan, the International Energy Agency says.
India generates about twothirds of its electricity with coal and gas, and despite ambitious plans for renewable energy the country is set to remain highly dependent on hydrocarbons for decades to come.