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Cooling reimagined: how India’s super-efficient ACs could transform the grid
6/8/2025
8 min read
Feature
Sara Siddeeq reports on an innovative industrial collaboration which aims to bring comfort and energy savings to residents of India’s sweltering cities.
As temperatures rise across tropical and subtropical regions, air conditioning (AC) is no longer a luxury – it’s rapidly becoming essential. In India alone, the number of room air conditioning units is set to soar from around 110 million today to more than 1.1 billion by 2050. This sharp increase is being driven not only by population growth, but also by rising incomes, urbanisation and increasingly extreme heat due to climate change.
Globally, electricity demand for space cooling is expected to triple by 2050, growing even faster than the rise in data centre energy use. In Indian cities, AC already accounts for up to half of electricity use during extreme heat. Left unchecked, this growth could place serious strain on electricity grids, drive up coal use and require vast infrastructure investment.
To confront this challenge, the Global Cooling Efficiency Accelerator (GCEA) was launched by RMI and the Clean Cooling Collaborative (CCC) to reshape the sector. The initiative builds on the Global Cooling Prize – a 2018 competition supported by the Indian government – which aimed to identify and demonstrate residential air conditioners (ACs) with radically lower climate impact. The Prize invited manufacturers, startups and researchers to create ACs capable of reducing climate impact five-fold compared to the most commonly-sold products, by slashing energy consumption and using ultra-low-GWP (global warming potential) refrigerants. In 2021, manufacturers Daikin and Gree were announced as winners.