Anyone who can afford air-conditioning is now going to want it. Many who can’t will try to scrape together the means for at least a few days or weeks of cooling a year.
It’s easy to shrug this off as expected growth, of the kind every hot country has seen as incomes rise.
This isn’t just that.
It is also one of the century’s great electricity-demand stories.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned that, without strong action, indoor cooling energy demand globally could more than triple by 2050. Key drivers of this demand will be the massive and under-served emerging economies of India, Indonesia and Brazil.
We worry about the power demands of artificial intelligence, as we should. But an equally significant grid story may simply be ordinary Indians trying to sleep through June.
The India Cooling Action Plan (ICAP), first published by the union environment ministry in 2019, projects that India’s total cooling demand will grow from roughly 121 million tonnes of refrigeration in 2017 to nearly 983 million tonnes by 2037. More than eight times in two decades.
Hot regions like the Middle-East offer a glimpse of what such a spurt can mean for power consumption.
Air-conditioning in Saudi Arabia accounts for an estimated 50% to 70% of household power consumption. Across several countries in the Gulf region, cooling accounts for roughly half of all peak electricity demand.
India will head into its surge with a far larger population, a far-less-stable grid, and as of now, fewer rules governing efficient adoption.
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The paradox is genuinely troubling.
Cooling is increasingly essential for productivity, learning, comfort, rest and, in some cases, survival. But scale it through inefficient, energy-guzzling systems and one risks driving electricity demand skyward, adding to emissions, raising outdoor temperatures, and worsening peak-load stress on a grid that already buckles in summer.
The paradox has a moral dimension that engineering discussions tend to obscure.
The people making the case against rapid AC expansion are almost without exception people who already have it. The people asked to endure the heat in the name of environmental restraint are almost without exception the people who do not.
Is there a way out?
There are countries trying to answer this question by treating cooling as essential, but tightly governed.
With more than 90% penetration, Japan treats air-conditioning as essential infrastructure, but its energy performance standards for ACs are among the strictest in the world. The Japanese government’s Super Cool Biz campaign, meanwhile, encourages companies to set the temperature no lower than 28 degrees Celsius in summer, and relax dress codes, to reduce cooling demand.
Singapore has strong energy-use laws and leverages district cooling, in which chilled water from a centralised system is distributed through underground pipes to cool buildings while reducing strain on the power grid.
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India has a policy of sorts in place, but it is an inequitable and inefficient one: income determines access to cooling.
The below-poverty-line card may secure subsidised grain, but only a bigger paycheque opens the door to at least a few hours of air-conditioning when required. The wealthy, meanwhile, have inverter ACs in every room and a backup generator for when the power goes out.
An estimated 8% to 10% of Indian households currently own an air-conditioner.
As this figure rises, India’s share of peak electricity consumed by cooling is projected to jump from 10% to 45% by 2050. Our grid is not set up for this; neither are our cities.
Many of us still believe traditional methods will come to our rescue, which means we aren’t planning for what we are about to need. It would help to acknowledge that the days of deep verandas, courtyard homes, khus curtains, earthen pots of water and afternoon stillness solving the problem, as in RK Narayan’s Malgudi Days, are gone.
As our cities have soared upward, asphalt has replaced trees, concrete replaced earth, and our urban density does not allow for the breathing room that old architecture took for granted.
Cities absorb so much solar radiation during the day, in fact, that they release it back at night, leaving humans, animals, plants and what remains of natural ecosystems little room to recover.
The city becomes a battery for misery, charging all day and radiating heat into the bedrooms of the poor at night.
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The best time for adaptation was a decade ago; as the African proverb goes, the second-best time is now.
Some of the tools are already known.
Cool roofs that reflect solar radiation can reduce indoor temperatures by 2 to 4 degrees Celsius. They are low-cost and high-impact.
High-insulation walls, heat-resistant materials, green walls, and smart glass that adjusts transparency based on sunlight can also reduce cooling demand and reduce strain on the grid.
District cooling has been implemented for the first time in India at GIFT (Gujarat International Finance Tec-City) in Gandhinagar. It uses piped chilled water produced at a central plant to cool buildings, consuming 30% less energy than traditional AC systems.
At the grid level, incentivising solar-power adoption, time-of-use pricing and smart controls that raise thermostat settings by 1 to 2 degrees Celsius during periods of high demand can help with grid stability.
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In a bit of good news, small but important steps are already being taken.
The union ministry of power’s Bureau of Energy Efficiency has, since 2020, mandated a 24 degrees Celsius default minimum for new air-conditioner models covered by the star-labelling programme.
The India Cooling Action Plan sets sensible targets for 2037: a 20% to 25% reduction in cooling demand, a 25% to 30% reduction in refrigerant demand, and a 25% to 40% reduction in cooling energy requirements.
Measures on multiple fronts, such as energy-efficient ACs, insulated walls, cool roofs, district cooling, and low-global-warming-potential refrigerants could help us inch our way towards these goals.
The opposite is also true. Every year of unplanned growth in cooling demand locks in inefficient infrastructure. Every building designed without adaptive features is a building that will likely tax the grid for decades.
We obsessively track GDP, inflation, credit growth, monsoon deficits, and the current account. We debate farm loan waivers and obsess over the price of onions. We have not yet had a serious national conversation about cooling as an issue of development: who gets it, how it will be powered, and how we will navigate the trade-offs between power, emissions, and the very real, and increasingly hazardous, costs borne by those who cannot afford it.
The India Cooling Action Plan contains a sentence that belongs on the wall of every ministry: Thermal Comfort for All. Four words that contain multitudes: a moral obligation and a civilisational engineering challenge.
Next to the sign on the wall, we might need a countdown. Because the overheating has begun.
(What else will it take to make it through summer? Click here for Kashyap Kompella’s 2026 stocktaking)
