The good news for our industry is that sales from the air conditioning sector will begin to increase as investment in new construction and remodeling continues to grow; as stated in a recent BSRIA report indicating that the global air conditioning market is growing because they are an increasingly basic product.
The bad news is that by 2050 the global demand for energy will triple and one of the big generators of that increase are air conditioning and cooling solutions. The International Energy Agency said in a study that the global stock of air conditioners in buildings will grow to 5.6 billion by 2050, up from 1.6 billion today, equivalent to 10 new air conditioning units sold per second over the next 30 years. With those numbers your mouth is watering.
But here the question as an industry is what else are we going to do to prevent electricity consumption from rising in that way? Is what is being done now enough? The answer, perhaps, is to continue to pressure governments to further monitor the commercialization of low-efficiency solutions. Yes, those you find in supermarkets, even with R-22 and for a much lower value than an R410 option, inverter and with high levels of SEER. But the price competition remains hard to beat.
Anyway... those figures are there to rejoice us or to worry us. What is clear is that we cannot reach a ceiling with this matter. More work needs to be done to prevent electricity consumption from rising in this way, because in the future, this will hurt our industry more than it can benefit it.
