The answer is not air conditioners

The recent USD 1 trillion Infrastructure Bill in the United States’ agenda to Build Back Better has allotted about USD 5 billion to a variety of measures that will reduce building electricity use, improve building materials, and create a skilled workforce to design, build and maintain energy efficient buildings. A large fraction of this funding, about USD 3.5 billion, will focus on improving access to thermal comfort for low income households – better insulation, windows, roofing, heating and cooling devices. The bill also directs USD 500 million to public schools for replacement of old inefficient HVAC systems, among other measures. Given that about buildings account for about 75 percent of the country’s electricity demand, this bill is a significant step in the right direction. Such an overhaul is much needed for country where 90 percent of the households in the United States have HVAC systems for their cooling, ventilation and heating needs. 

In contrast, the India Cooling Action Plan (ICAP) in 2019 reported that about 10 percent of India’s 272 million households own air conditioners with an expected increase of cooling demand by eleven times in residential sector over the next two decades. The corollary to rapid increase in cooling demand, in the absence of suitable interventions is, uptake of least efficient air conditioners. While India’s per capita buildings energy use is among the lowest in the world today, it is set to grow faster than any region in the coming decades. In order to be able to envision a sustainable future for residential cooling, perhaps even massive financial investment on infrastructure, we must first come to terms with how India currently accesses thermal comfort. 

Accessing thermal comfort through stacking strategies 

As a tropical country with over five different climate zones experiencing air conditioner proliferation in the recent decade, much of India’s population comfort range in temperature is dictated by the outside climate. An investigation in a government school located in the city of Ambala ¹ found that a temperature range of 15.3-33.7°C fell under occupant comfort; a range that is higher than those prescribed by both Indian and International Standards for adult population. Another study in affordable housing in Mumbai ² revealed occupant comfort in the temperature range of 19.8-34.8°C, wherein both the minimum and maximum were about 6°C higher than prescribed standards.^, 3,4

This tolerance to higher temperatures has been attributed to urban residents’ commonly used adaptive actions such as the use of a ceiling fans, opening of windows, and use of curtains. Less commonly used adaptive actions were roof or floor wetting and use of air-conditioners or air-coolers. These are actions that we have witnessed or performed in our own households as means to achieve thermal comfort during sweltering summers. These can also be dubbed as energy conservation behaviours that help achieve optimal thermal comfort.  

Stacking of strategies that reduce dependence on air conditioners in Indian households are common and often include the use of fans in tandem or as a substitute. A study in Pondicherry’s Auroville further substantiated this finding in addition to the observation that households did not use air conditioners continuously for attaining thermal comfort. Households across India are also known to avoid starting air-conditioner usage until outside temperatures exceeded 32°C ⁵ and peak use of air conditioners are during the hours when all residents of the house are presumably at home, that is between 10pm and 1am. ⁶

Additional energy conservation behaviours among the small fraction of air conditioner owning households have also been well noted. A 2020 study in Delhi reported three-fourth of the surveyed households used their air-conditioners for 6 hours or lower. The study further stated that even in the wealthiest neighbourhoods, during the hottest months of the year, about 15 percent of the households used air-conditioners for more than 8 hours per day. Another study in 2019 across four cities – Dhanbad, Meerut, Madurai and Vadodara – revealed that households used their air conditioners for less than six months in a year, with a majority stating four months. ⁷

Achievability of thermal comfort in public spaces

Today the majority of Indian households are either adapting to outside temperatures or adopting some energy conservation behaviours in relation to affording thermal comfort. Beyond homes, public spaces such as offices, shops, schools, hospitals, courtrooms etc, access to thermal comfort may not be as straight forward. A 2019 report by Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy stated that in survey across 6650 users of District Courts, about 37% stated the need for better ventilation in waiting areas. ⁸ These respondents stated that there was a need to add fans or air conditioners to these spaces to improve the user experience. A report by the sub-committee of the National Court Management Systems Committee recommended proper ventilation and temperature control either by air conditioners or coolers as imperative infrastructure provision for courts.

In addition to these waiting areas court complexes like many other publicly accessed buildings have a host of other amenities – ATMs, a bank branch, a canteen, first-aid care services, oath commissioners, photocopy facility, a police booth, a post office, public notaries, stamp vendors, and typists. Anecdotally we observe that ATM booths used for an average of less than fifteen minutes by people are stocked with a full-powered air conditioning, while offices of photocopiers, public notaries spaces inhabited for at least nine hours a day are likely to be inadequately ventilated and are more likely rely entirely on fans for thermal comfort.

Thermal comfort is a niche subject that remains with architects, builders and energy consultants. While temperatures are rapidly soaring as a result of climate change, thermal comfort is not yet a human rights issue nor is it a developmental concern (given the plethora of other real human rights violations this neglect is understandable). However, when regulations are not able to consider all a respects of how thermal comfort pervades our day-to-day it is likely to serve the needs of very few. This is already being observed in how cooling is often confounded with air conditioning, both by policy and people. Existing programmes focusing on cooling energy efficiency (for e.g. BEE’s star rating programme and EESL’s super-efficient air conditioner programme) while successful, have not reached the halls of courtrooms and many such publicly accessed spaces. 

To afford a future where thermal comfort for all is a reality, we need to first study how we access it today. We need to understand who is accessing thermal comfort and how. There needs to be more conversations between those that design buildings and those that design policies. 

This is the second of a series of five essays aiming to examine the essential elements of access to thermal comfort or cooling in India. 

<sup>1.  Composite climate zone
2.  Warm and humid climate zone
3.  Standards compared by the study were IMAC (NBC 2016) and Adaptive model (ASHRAE 55-2010). 
4. Malik, J and Bardhan R. (2020). Thermal comfort in affordable housing of Mumbai, India. Energise 2020 Paper Proceedings. https://www.energiseindia.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Energise-2020-paper-proceedings.pdf
5.  Somvanshi, A. (2019) A midsummer nightmare. Centre for Science and Environment
6. Khosla, R., Agarwal, A., Sircar, N., and Chaterjee, D. (2021). The what, why, and how of changing cooling energy consumption in India’s urban household. Environmental Research Letters. 16 044035 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abecbc
7. Gorthi, A., Bhasin, S., and Chaturvedi, V. (2020). Assessing Consumers’ behaviours, perceptions, and challenges to enhance air conditioner energy efficiency. Energise 2020 Paper Proceedings. https://www.energiseindia.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Energise-2020-paper-proceedings.pdf
8. https://vidhilegalpolicy.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/National-report_single_Aug-1.pdf</sup>

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Green, clean and lean air-conditioners, but with no access it is just mean!

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) sixth assessment report (2021) in clear terms attributed climate change to human activities and stated that many parts of the world are already experiencing its ill-effects. Lancet’s Countdown on Health Climate Change (2021), further substantiated the impact of extreme climate events by reporting that between 2018 and 2019 India had the biggest absolute increase in heat related mortality in the world. Empirical evidence from Kolkata shows that the city has warmed by 2.6°C relative to 1950, the highest among the cities sampled by the IPCC. The next in-line in terms of rapidly warming cities, stated another analysis, were Bengaluru and Delhi with a predicted +1°C rise in temperatures. 

For climate scientists, policymakers, and activists this signals urgent action – net-zero goals and targeted climate finance, among other such solutions. For an average citizen, this signals the need to purchase an air conditioner. Controlled, optimal indoor temperatures are an undeniable adaptation strategy, linked closely to health, productivity and ultimately economic development. 

However, here lies the challenge. With less than 10 percent of the households owning air conditioners today, India has been postulated to be a tremendous market for cooling appliances. However, India is already among the top 10 countries with the largest urban populations at risk from the lack of cooling; with more than 110 million people at risk. There is a heat inequity at play here – only some of us are likely to successfully adapt to the impacts of extreme heat. 

Simultaneously, there is the much talked about dichotomy of cooling – the more we cool our residences and offices, the more the planet heats up. When thermal comfort or more generally cooling is already an adaptation need, how can cities also make it a key sector for climate change mitigation?

Defining our cooling goals 

Global discourse around environmentally-responsible cooling had its inception at the Montreal Protocol, as a result of which ozone depleting refrigerants have been phased out by 197 countries. More recently, the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol has countries phasing down potent greenhouse gases (GHG) used as refrigerants while simultaneous pushing for improvements in energy efficiency in cooling appliances. The Kigali Amendment has thus centred cooling as a key sector for climate mitigation and this in turn has given rise to variety of strategies. 

Today, there is acknowledgement among governments on the importance and need for cooling, especially under the popular rhetoric of ‘cooling for all’. Strategies such as green cooling, climate-friendly cooling, and sustainable cooling, to name a few, are being explored as potential ways to mitigate effects of cooling. However, a critical question to ask at this time is what these mean and whom they benefit.  

The first among these is Green Cooling which “requires the use of natural refrigerant and energy efficient appliances and buildings.” This strategy aims to reduce demand for cooling, and minimise the GHG emissions during the operational lifetime of the cooling equipment. A key feature of green cooling is that the demand for cooling is reduced through better building design and material use, thereby limiting the need for energy guzzling air conditioners for cooling. 

A slightly more reformed version of Green Cooling is Net-Zero Cooling, which looks to eliminate any carbon emissions from cooling. Net-zero cooling is defined in the Climate Action Pathway as “reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from cooling during operational life of products (excluding resource extraction and manufacturing) to as close to zero as possible and any remaining GHG emissions would be balanced with an equivalent amount of carbon removal – for example, by restoring forests and through direct air capture and storage technology.” Net-zero cooling, like green cooling, as per the EIA’s recent analysis, focuses on natural refrigerants with minimal global warming potential. 
Both green and net-zero cooling place technology at the centre and aim to minimise GHG emissions from cooling during the lifetime of the appliance. They have been instrumental in promoting alternative, climate-friendly approaches like natural refrigerants, not-in-kind technologies, cooling as a service, district cooling, cool roofs, to name a few. At the moment however, mainstreaming these technologies and making them affordable comes with a slew of challenges, noted in our latest series of Policy Briefs on Green Cooling in India. Further, a recent analysis found that even with the most accelerated technology progress projection of efficient cooling appliances, in a ‘cooling for all’ scenario the energy demand for cooling is ~2.5 times the maximum energy we can afford to allot to this sector to keep temperature rise under 2°C.

How to avoid cooling for some and heating for others

A recent report by the Centre for Sustainable Cooling stated – “We urgently need access to clean cooling for all. In order to achieve this, we need to stop asking ourselves ‘how much electricity do we need to generate?’ and start asking ‘what is the service we require, and how can we provide it in the least damaging way?’” They further define ‘Clean Cooling’ as a means to “meet cooling needs efficiently and sustainably within the constraints from climate change, natural resource and clean air targets. Clean cooling necessarily must be affordable and accessible to all to deliver the societal, economic and health goals. It likely starts with mitigating demand.” 

The global discourse on cooling for thermal comfort has moved from being solely technology focused to acknowledging the humans who are likely to need access to it. The fact that the discourse on cooling largely has its roots in Montreal Protocol has often led to cooling being confounded with air conditioning. Whereas the fact remains that a majority of urban households in India rely on electric fans (>90% as per Census 2011-12). Given the aspirational aspect of owning air conditioners in addition to rapidly heating urban centres, the growing middle class is predicted to buy the least expensive and thus least efficient air conditioners in the coming decade. 

To avoid such a future, our developmental and climate policies, roadmaps, and programmes must not only address cooling as an important resource but also place the end-users as the focus of cooling strategies. Critical questions that such policies must address are: who will need to be prioritised and how do we prioritise them? how do we move away from cooling only affluent spaces? how do we finance such an endeavour? Discourse of this nature is vital to reinventing strategies, redefining goals and refining approaches.

This is the first of a series of five essays aiming to examine the essential elements of access to thermal comfort or cooling in India.

_{1. According to a report by the Centre for Sustainable Cooling – “Cooling for All, a hypothetical scenario is developed whereby refrigeration equipment penetrations globally converge by 2050 with those experienced in the developed world today (USA as the proxy), and air conditioning is made available to all populations experiencing more than 2000 Cooling Degree Days per year.” They further define cooling degree day (CDD) as “the demand for cooling a building. It is the number of degrees that a day’s average temperature is above 21° C in this instance multiplied by the number of days per year. China experiences 2,030 cooling-degree days per year, whereas the United Kingdom experiences 135. The UAE experiences over 10,000 cooling degree-days per year.”}

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The Montreal protocol and all its subsequent amendments focused on transitioning away from ozone depleting gases. Hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) gases emerged as a stop-gap-solution for cooling applications. While HFCs are not ozone depleting they have a fairly high global warming potential (GWP). The Kigali Amendment addresses this by setting a timeline for phase-down of high-GWP HFCs. A forward-looking strategy at this time would be to avoid making another pitstop for transition refrigerants but instead make a leapfrog to climate-friendly refrigerants.  

Alternatives for high-GWP refrigerants have either been low-GWP synthetic HFCs, hydrofluoroolefins (HFOs) and their blends or natural refrigerants such as ammonia, carbon dioxide, hydrocarbons (HC) and water. Multinational companies are promoting synthetic refrigerants as drop-in replacements, allowing for continued use of existing equipment. A critical drawback of synthetic refrigerants is their detrimental impact on the climate and/or the environment. For instance, many ‘low-GWP’ HFCs have GWP values of greater than 100. The breakdown products of HFOs like Trifluoroacetic acid, on the other hand, have been found to be eco-toxic and accumulate in water bodies. Additionally, most synthetic refrigerants are fiercely guarded by patents, making them expensive.

Natural refrigerants, on the other hand, have GWP values as low as 10 and are substantially cheaper than synthetic alternatives. Other widely discussed advantages of natural refrigerants include their cost saving capacity both in terms of energy efficiency and lower maintenance costs. A major hindrance to the widespread use of natural refrigerants is their flammability and/or toxicity relative to HFCs. Technological advances have enabled the safe use of HCs and ammonia for cooling applications albeit in applications requiring low amounts of refrigerants. Widespread use of natural refrigerant-based cooling as well as expanding their applications requires safety standards and skilled labour for installation and maintenance.

In 2020, the Bureau of India Standards (BIS) adopted IEC 60335-2-40:2018 and Code of Practice for design and installation of the closed-circuit ammonia systems (MED 3 (14430)). Both of these standards target natural refrigerants, aiming to make them safe to use in all types of cooling applications.

The adoption of IEC 60335-2-40:2018 is a significant move as it allows for greater charge sizes of refrigerants like HC but with more stringent safety measures. The standard may help with widespread use of Propane (HC 290) as a refrigerant in room air conditioners and perhaps even for commercial applications.

BIS’s decision to publish the code of practice MED 3 (14430) is a critical step as it prescribes India-specific standards to cover all ammonia refrigeration applications. Notably, the Association for Ammonia Refrigeration (AAR) played a pivotal role in the creation of these standards to meet specific design/testing requirements for Indian conditions. With the implementation of these standards, ammonia refrigeration systems in India will be energy-efficient, sustainable and most importantly safe.

With safety standards of natural refrigerants in place, the way forward from here would be to promote their use by the Indian manufacturers. Towards this, the Government of India can roll-out a ‘Make in India’ program for natural refrigerant-based cooling appliances. This will create a large number of jobs in manufacturing and for installation and maintenance of these units. India can also play a major role in promoting the use of natural refrigerants in other developing countries of Asia and Africa as part of south-south cooperation.

References:

treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=IND&mtdsg_no=XXVII-2-f&chapter=27&clang=_en

Ivan, R. E. (n.d.). Kigali Amendment. Regulatory framework, benefits and policies for ratification, UNIDO. www.unido.org/sites/default/files/2017-06/13June_KigaliAmendment_RegulatoryFramework_0.pdf)

McLaughlin, C. (2 July 2018). Germany warns R1234yf could cause harm to drinking water. R744. r744.com/articles/8395/germany_warns_r1234yf_could_cause_harm_to_drinking_water

Greenpeace. (n.d.). Natural Refrigerants: The Solutions.  www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/legacy/Global/usa/planet3/PDFs/hfc-solutions-fact-sheet.pdf

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