6 Facts About Europe and Air Conditioning

There is a heat wave in Europe, the world’s fastest warming continent. And so, as you may have heard, a perennial topic of online climate discourse has returned: Why don’t more Europeans have air conditioning?

I’m partially convinced this is psy op, or at least a figment of how social media organizes attention. I have a hypothesis that various “For You” page algorithms, especially that of the social network X, began to reward content that performed unusually well across national borders a few years ago. Since then, the amount of America vs. Europe content has surged. (Of course, writers have been comparing American and European lifestyles for much longer than that.)

Suffice it to say, though: It’s a fraught topic. I’ve assumed that as extreme heat gets worse as the climate changes, Europeans will simply get on with it and install AC, much as Americans in the Pacific Northwest have done. Yet there are cultural and regulatory obstacles to AC’s growth in Europe.

I’m sure I’ll write about it in the future, but for now I want to get a grip on the facts themselves. And so as a Friday special, I present to you — the facts about European AC, as I understand it:

• Only about 19% of European homes have air conditioning. That’s less than the United States, of course. But it’s also less than Canada, which has a more comparable climate. Nearly 70% of Canadian homes have air conditioning or equivalent equipment.
• The United States doesn’t have the world’s highest rates of air conditioning penetration, by the way, although 88% of us do have some form of AC. The number one spot is held by Japan, where 91% of homes have cooling.
• Only 0.8% of European household energy use goes to space cooling. Again, for comparison, that’s about half the share of energy that goes to space cooling in Canada. (In the U.S., about 6% of household energy use goes to space cooling — and despite our warmer climate, far more energy on average goes to space heating in the winter.)
• That said, Europe is catching up fast, particularly in warm countries. Air conditioning penetration has more than doubled in Europe since 1990. More than half of Italian households now have air conditioning. That rate has nearly doubled since 2013, and it has grown much faster in southern Italy than northern Italy.
• The further north you go, the more the rates fall. About 28% of French homes and 13% of apartments have some kind of air conditioning. Only about 6% of German homes have AC.
• Just over 4% of British homes have air conditioning. What’s most striking to me, though, is that the elderly are most susceptible to heat-related death — and only 3% of households with someone over 75 in the UK have AC.

Thanks so much for reading, and talk soon.