Urban cooling demand

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The fastest-growing large use of electricity in the world, and the one most tightly bound to urban form. IEA analysis puts global electricity use for space cooling — air conditioners, fans and district cooling — at more than 2,900 terawatt-hours in 2025, up roughly 50 per cent over the preceding decade, more than the electricity consumption of the European Union, with the residential air-conditioner stock having tripled since 2000 to well over a billion units and the great majority of future growth expected in emerging and developing economies. The urban dimension is that cities are hotter than their surroundings by construction — dark impervious surface, waste heat, reduced evapotranspiration — so the same climate produces more cooling demand inside a city than outside it, and each additional unit of cooling rejects its heat into the street. It is the clearest case in the built environment of a device that solves the problem for the individual and adds to it for everyone, and it lands on the same grid that is being asked to decarbonise.