Energy demand for space cooling in the future: using refrigerant models and Cooling Degree Days to model energy demand in 2100 for Africa, India and the US

Abstract

As our world warms, the share of the population that owns an air conditioning unit (AC) will likely increase drastically. This has significant consequences for our climate, as the direct emissions from the refrigerant inside ACs, as well as the CO2-emissions associated with the electricity usage, will likely strongly increase. The aim of this study is to calculate the electricity demand for space cooling in 2100. As basis, refrigerant models are used. To make them suitable for use in this study these are improved by using the Cooling Degree Day (CDD) method as well as including several energy efficiency improvement scenarios for ACs. This study is the first that generated hourly CDD data that is free to use. The Python notebooks in the supplementals, together with a temperature database from NOAA, make it possible to generate hourly CDD data for weather stations all over the world. In this study it is shown that both Climate Change as well as different trajectories for energy efficiency improvement of ACs have significant impact on the electricity usage in 2100. Simulations presented here, based on IPCC projections on regional temperature increase, suggest that this will account for 50-100 percent increase in electricity usage in 2100 compared to 2016. The projections assume that the energy efficiency of ACs in 2100 will increase 100-300 percent, as compared to 2016. The latter making policies that regulate the minimum energy efficiency of ACs highly effective.