Tackling the World’s Surging Cooling Demand

How RMI and partners are helping drive holistic solutions to address rising heat stress across the globe

Between now and 2030, the increase in electricity demand for air conditioning systems alone will exceed that for data centers, one of the fastest-growing energy uses globally. By 2050, cooling electricity demand is expected to match the combined annual electricity consumption of the United States, China, India, Germany, and Japan today. Yet, cooling hasn’t made it to the top of energy transition conversations and receives far less attention than is needed.

This year is proving to be yet another hot and humid one. But this comes as no surprise, as it joins the warmest decade in recorded history. Just last month, several regions in South Asia and the Southwest United States already experienced pre-summer heatwaves, with temperatures exceeding historical averages by several degrees.

Now more than ever, tackling extreme heat is about more than just comfort. It’s also about productivity, survivability, and safely being able to operate outdoors and live inside our homes and other essential buildings and facilities such as data centers, factories, hospitals, and schools.

The scale of the cooling challenge

In 2022, cooling equipment consumed an estimated 5,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity globally — about the same as the entire electricity consumption of the United States today. By 2050, this demand is projected to triple to 18,000 TWh.

Cooling also carries a significant emissions impact due to the use of electricity (still generated from fossil fuel-based power plants in most regions) and refrigerants that leak into the environment during servicing or at the end of life. It already accounts for 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions — roughly equal to the cement sector — and could rise to 15% by 2050. As increasing cooling drives energy and peak power demand and need for refrigerants , it will create more emissions and warming, feeding a dangerous cycle.

An integrated approach to solving the cooling challenge

No one technology can solve this unprecedented cooling challenge. An integrated approach is foundational to ensure that people can better respond and adapt to extreme heat events as well as adopt sustainable cooling solutions that reduce planet warming emissions.

RMI and our partners around the world have prioritized three core pillars to tackle the rising heat stress issue and enhance thermal comfort for people: build resilience, enhance comfort, reduce emissions.

• Build Resilience — Build urban heat resilience through heat mitigation strategies, including nature-based solutions such as urban greening and reflective materials.
• Enhance comfort — Enhance affordable thermal comfort through passive design strategies and other low-cost, scalable solutions that reduce cooling needs and make cooling accessible to more people.
• Reduce emissions — Reduce energy use and emissions through super-efficient technologies, improved system design, and better refrigerant management, while scaling next-gen, innovative solutions that lower life-cycle costs and emissions.

When key actors across policy, technology and market align around this framework, it helps create the conditions needed to scale the right solutions that benefit the people and the planet.

Putting the approach into action

Build Resilience — Mitigating urban heat at the source

Reducing cooling demand effectively begins with understanding where heat poses the greatest risk. In many cities, responses are still guided by temperature thresholds rather than real-world impacts on people, infrastructure, and livelihoods.

But cities also need tools that help identify priority hotspots and target interventions to help prepare communities and infrastructure in advance, reducing exposure and managing cooling demand during the hottest periods when grids may otherwise fail. To address this, India’s National Disaster Management Authority developed the Heat Impact Assessment (HIA) Framework and a digital dashboard, empowering cities to identify priority hotspots and target interventions where they can deliver the greatest benefit.

Additionally, urban areas are often hotter than surrounding regions due to the urban heat island effect, where buildings and infrastructure trap heat. Expanding tree cover, improving ventilation, deploying heat-rejecting surfaces, and using thermally efficient materials can help reduce the impact of heat.

At scale, these solutions offer broader system-level benefits by reducing heat buildup across urban areas, lowering neighborhood temperatures, and helping mitigate the urban heat island effect.

Insights from work in communities highlight how combining building-level interventions like cool roofs with neighborhood-scale strategies — and including heat-sensitive urban design — can reduce heat exposure more effectively than stand-alone solutions. Layering interventions like cool corridors across neighborhoods using nature-based solutions, building materials, and urban form is critical to delivering sustained cooling at scale. Together, these approaches are key to improving heat resilience while easing grid stress during extreme heat days.

Enhance comfort — Reducing cooling needs affordably

Enhancing thermal comfort for people begins with helping people stay cool without relying on mechanical cooling systems. One key solution is to use materials that not only reflect sunlight but also actively shed heat. Pilots in Chennai, India, have demonstrated how “cool” roofs and surfaces can significantly reduce indoor temperatures, improving comfort — especially for those without access to air conditioning.

RMI’s climate tech accelerator, Third Derivative, is advancing passive daytime radiative cooling (PDRC) technologies, including specialized paints, films, and membranes. Unlike conventional cool roofs that primarily reflect solar radiation, PDRC materials are engineered to both reflect sunlight and emit heat as mid-infrared radiation that passes through the atmosphere into space. This dual mechanism enables them to cool surfaces below ambient temperatures, with the potential to lower indoor temperatures by up to 18°F (10°C) on hot days — without using electricity.

Passive design strategies, including PDRC, cool roof coatings, efficient building envelopes, solar shading, and proper ventilation, reduce the need for active cooling solutions, improving comfort and making cooling more affordable and accessible for all.

Reduce Emissions — Advancing efficiency and accelerating innovation

Today’s air conditioners (ACs) need to be re-designed to fully optimize the refrigeration cycle and deliver better comfort and energy performance using high-efficiency components. The Global Cooling Efficiency Accelerator, supported by RMI and partners, conducted extensive prototype field testing in Palava City, India, where super-efficient AC prototypes maintained consistent comfort (below 27°C/80.6°F and 60% relative humidity) even in extreme conditions, while cutting peak power demand by up to 50%. Additionally, they used 60% less energy than today’s common models and delivered better dehumidification, reducing the need for overcooling the indoor spaces, which means dramatically lower total cost of ownership for consumers. This is particularly important as many households buy their first AC to seek respite from high wet-bulb temperatures that are reaching critical human survivability thresholds.

However, scaling these improvements requires more than better technology. Updated testing and performance standards are needed to enable fair comparison and clear differentiation of efficient technologies. At the same time, aligned procurement specifications and strong demand signals from like-minded buyers give manufacturers the confidence that the market is ready — helping drive a fundamental shift in how technologies are produced and purchased.

RMI and partners are actively working across both the demand and supply sides to help shape the market for products that ease the tension between people’s comfort, grid reliability, and emissions.

As ACs get widely adopted globally, addressing refrigerant emissions is as critical as improving energy efficiency. Transitioning to low-GWP and natural refrigerants, as well as improved life-cycle refrigerant management — including leak reduction, recovery, and reclamation — is essential to prevent significant climate impacts from cooling systems.

And as we improve today’s AC technology to become super-efficient, there is an opportunity to go even further. Innovation across the cooling sector is essential to unlocking the full range of solutions needed to address this challenge. For example,  desiccant-based systems and hybrid solutions using membrane technologies can separately and independently manage dehumidification from cooling, enabling more efficient operation in humid climates.  Solid-state technologies, which use an applied field or pressure instead of refrigerants, can offer improved efficiency and comfort, quieter operation, lower energy costs, and reduced emissions.

RMI’s Third Derivative program is actively sourcing and supporting these emerging cooling innovations, working with eight startups globally that are developing innovative active cooling technologies, from optimized system design to highly efficient humidity management with liquid desiccants and refrigerant-free solid-state cooling.

The path forward

In the coming years, we will continue to deepen our engagement with key stakeholders to support them in implementing national and sub-national policies and to adopt low-cost scalable passive design strategies and solutions that reduce cooling demand at the source.

We will also continue working to accelerate the development and scale of super-efficient cooling technologies, advance refrigerant management efforts, and unlock next-generation innovations. We aim to deepen our understanding of the rapidly evolving cooling technology landscape to identify the most relevant and impactful opportunities for intervention. We will work closely with policymakers, manufacturers, buyers, and startups to pilot solutions, strengthen performance standards, and build the market confidence needed to drive widespread adoption.

Taking a holistic, whole-systems approach — build resilience, enhance comfort, and reduce emissions — can deliver significant impact, on both the building level and across the entire cooling sector. This could translate into electricity savings of up to 8,500 TWh by 2050 — more than the current annual consumption of the United States and the European Union combined — while reducing peak demand and avoiding the need for thousands of new power plants. And improving AC efficiency levels by over 50% means people can cool their homes when they need to without stressing the grid, driving up electricity bills, or adding to emissions.

In a warming world where heat stress is rising and rapid urbanization and increasing incomes will drive significant growth in cooling demand, accelerating these efforts is critical. By working collaboratively, we can ensure cooling needs are met for all without accelerating the warming of our planet.

We would like to thank Ankit Kalanki, Tarun Garg, and Tess Healy for their contributions to this article.