You are here » » » Air ConditioningAmerica used to be the king of car sales, but China took that crown in 2009. America also used to be the world’s biggest polluter, but China now has that dubious distinction as well. Now China — along with India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines — could be set to surpass the U.S. in air conditioning use. The U.S. uses more air conditioning than all other countries combined. But according to a new study from Michael Sivak, a research professor at the University of Michigan, eight developing countries (including the six Asian countries previously listed) could eventually put the U.S. to shame when it comes to air conditioning use. Sivak developed an index for cooling demand by looking at mean daily outdoor temperatures and factoring those with population figures and distribution. He then normalized the index with U.S. values. The result is a projection for air conditioning usage if it were as widely used as in America:

If the rest of the world caught up with the U.S., the 169 countries surveyed by Sivak could represent demand 45 times greater than current U.S. demand. If every country in the world were factored in, demand could be more than 50 times greater than in America. “It is clear that the global energy demand for air-conditioning will grow substantially as nations become more affluent, with the consequences of climate change potentially accelerating the demand. This trend will put additional strain not only on global energy resources but also on the environmental prospects of a warming planet,” wrote Sivak. Sivak isn’t making a prediction about when this spike in demand will happen. He’s only projecting what would happen if countries adopted American standards of cooling. But he points out some notable trends. In India, the country with the highest potential usage spike, air conditioning sales are increasing by 20 percent each year. And in China, 50 million air conditioning units were sold in 2010.

Two other researchers at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency projected that global warming could increase cooling demand by 72 percent by the end of the century.who makes the best split ac units In June, the International Energy Agency issued a report calling for basic efficiency standards for appliances, motors and air conditioning units in developing countries, concluding that these simple measures could account for half the carbon emissions reductions needed to stabilize global temperature rise at two degrees Celsius by mid century.wall ac units cheapThe Guardian has an interesting look at the growth in air conditioning usage both within the United States and internationally.where is the ac unit filter [W]orld sales in 2011 were up 13 percent over 2010, and that growth is expected to accelerate in coming decades.

By my very rough estimate, residential, commercial, and industrial air conditioning worldwide consumes at least one trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually. Vehicle air conditioners in the United States alone use 7 to 10 billion gallons of gasoline annually. And thanks largely to demand in warmer regions, it is possible that world consumption of energy for cooling could explode tenfold by 2050, giving climate change an unwelcome dose of extra momentum. The United States has long consumed more energy each year for air conditioning than the rest of the world combined. In fact, we use more electricity for cooling than the entire continent of Africa, home to a billion people, consumes for all purposes. Between 1993 and 2005, with summers growing hotter and homes larger, energy consumed by residential air conditioning in the U.S. doubled, and it leaped another 20 percent by 2010. The climate impact of air conditioning our buildings and vehicles is now that of almost half a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.

If the estimates made by the author (Stan Cook, who also writes for Yale’s Environment 360) are correct, car air conditioning accounts for between 5 and 7 percent of the nation’s entire 2011 gasoline usage. (The Energy Information Administration has a somewhat lower estimation of the amount of electricity spent on cooling — some 479 billion kilowatt-hours — though the excludes manufacturing.) While we’re currently the world leaders in air conditioning use, that’s expected to change. China is already sprinting forward and is expected to surpass the United States as the world’s biggest user of electricity for air conditioning by 2020. Consider this: The number of U.S. homes equipped with air conditioning rose from 64 to 100 million between 1993 and 2009, whereas 50 million air-conditioning units were sold in China in 2010 alone. And it is projected that the number of air-conditioned vehicles in China will reach 100 million in 2015, having more than doubled in just five years.

As urban China, Japan, and South Korea approach the air-conditioning saturation point, the greatest demand growth in the post-2020 world is expected to occur elsewhere, most prominently in South and Southeast Asia. India will predominate — already, about 40 percent of all electricity consumption in the city of Mumbai goes for air conditioning. The Middle East is already heavily climate-controlled, but growth is expected to continue there as well. Within 15 years, Saudi Arabia could actually be consuming more oil than it exports, due largely to air conditioning. And with summers warming, the United States and Mexico will continue increasing their heavy consumption of cool. Good thing we’re not expecting average temperatures to increase any time soon! There’s a sliver of silver lining. A recent study by the International Energy Agency suggested an alternative system that could substantially reduce carbon output: solar. Yes, even for cooling. Almost a sixth of the world’s low-temperature heating and cooling energy could come from solar power by the middle of the century, say energy experts.