One appliance could determine whether India, and the world, meet climate change targets
Raheel Shaikh had worked his way up from a $90-a-month entry-level job in digital marketing to a position that paid 10 times as much. He remodeled the two-room apartment he shares with his parents, bought a motorbike and was planning his wedding in January.
Finally, this summer, the 30-year-old Shaikh splurged on the new must-have item for the upwardly mobile Indian: an air conditioner...
"My parents lived without it all their lives, but I am earning well so I wanted to give them that comfort," Shaikh said. "For a middle-class Indian like me, it was part of my plan."
More than any other household good, the air conditioner symbolizes the soaring aspirations of one of the world's fastest growing major economies. Although only 5% of Indians own the appliances today, they are buying millions more every year, driving a worldwide boom that, according to one estimate, will nearly triple the planet's stock of air conditioners to 2.5 billion by 2050.
When Shaikh was growing up, air-conditioning was a luxury associated with five-star hotels, while ordinary Indians survived the summers by lugging pedestal fans from room to room or dabbing themselves with wet towels. As temperatures and incomes rise, the air conditioner is now what Nikit Abhyankar, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory calls "a threshold good — the moment you cross into that middle-class income level, you go and buy one."
But all that crisp air will carry mammoth challenges.
The average air conditioner sucks 20 times as much energy as a ceiling fan, and studies show that space cooling accounts for 40% to 60% of the peak energy load during the summer in hot Indian cities such as Mumbai and New Delhi. By 2030, Abhyankar projects, the explosion in air-conditioning alone will raise India's electricity demands by 150 gigawatts, the equivalent of adding three economies the size of California to its power grid.
Most of that electricity will come from coal, pumping out more of the carbon emissions that are blamed for worsening pollution, respiratory diseases, millions of premature deaths and hotter air temperatures — which will only push people to buy more air conditioners...