Economies Can Boom When Powered by Efficient Motor Systems
Motors are the invisible heartbeat to economic progress. They are found across industrial facilities, powering production lines for goods like metals, paper, cement, textiles, and packaged food and beverages. Energy efficient motors and their associated components are key tools to enable economic growth, but inefficient ones can hinder progress via high energy demand and associated costs.
A golden opportunity
Efficient motors systems offer a golden opportunity for all countries –from existing economic powerhouses to newly industrializing nations– to expand and thrive in global markets while simultaneously slashing energy costs and emissions.
Motor systems 101
Industrial motors, like those found in factories, are part of a system of several components. When evaluating efficiency, governments and the private sector must look at and address the whole system, from power source to mechanical output. These systems are responsible for powering many recognizable factory features like conveyer belts and air compressors.
Inefficient motor systems lock in years of downsides
Without intervention to ramp up efficiency, motor systems will account for 25% of global energy demand and 33% of global energy related emissions by 2050.
And these inefficiencies are expensive: continued use of outdated motor systems will be responsible for $9 trillion of lost GDP in 2050.
Outdated and inefficient motors represent two-thirds of today’s global stock. These motors can last upwards of 15 years, locking countries into a future of high energy consumption, unnecessary emissions, and strained power grids.
More efficient industry is the key to economic progress
Increasing the market share of efficient motor systems for all economies offers significant and sustained benefits. A timely transition will require leaders to push the boundaries on policymaking and financing.
Heavily industrialized countries, like China and the European Union, need to replace existing inefficient motor stock with the most efficient IE5 compliant technologies and pair them with variable speed drives to achieve the biggest cost and climate benefits. This move can be catalyzed by ambitious efficiency policy and will require significant financing support from sources like industrial banks.
In countries where manufacturing is expected to grow significantly, with commensurate increase in motor stock, like Nigeria and Indonesia, quick government action to incentivize or require efficient motor systems in new factories will prevent runaway emissions and costs from the start. External financial support and mechanisms, like subsidies and bulk procurement, will be critical for supporting emerging industry.
CLASP supports leaders in getting the most out of motors
Efficient motors systems have been available for decades, but barriers to entry, like cost and expertise, have slowed adoption. CLASP is supporting government and industry leaders in seizing the opportunity for big economic and climate wins through innovative policy and industrial initiatives.
- In China, where world-leading motor system efficiency policies are in place, CLASP funded a pilot project at six sites to measure the performance of motor systems in air compressors – a key piece of factory equipment. The data from these informed new voluntary national standards.
- In India, CLASP’s market research and analyses are helping policymakers build the case for ambitious efficiency policy improvement and revised motor labeling classes that will empower industry to choose more efficient equipment.
- In Nigeria and Indonesia, our experts are working with policymakers to gather market data to inform new motor efficiency requirements.
- In Pakistan, CLASP and partner, SAMA^verte, created an Industry Accelerator program, aimed at building the expertise of local manufacturers and helping improve their ability to produce more efficient motors.
To explore more of CLASP’s motor work, check out our motors page and news section.
Brazil Put a Spotlight on its Efficiency Agenda at COP30
In recent years, Brazil has taken initial steps toward a more sustainable future powered by energy efficiency. As the host of COP30, held in Belém in November, Brazil put a spotlight on this smart climate solution for the world to see.
The country is already a global leader in sustainable energy, generating 89% of its electricity with renewables. However, rapidly rising energy demand and decreased hydropower capacity are forcing policymakers and utilities to reevaluate the current energy mix.
Global warming and Brazil’s deep income inequality further complicate this challenge. For example, Brazil’s summers are growing hotter; in 2023, the country hit a new record temperature of 112.6° F (44.8° C). As a result, air conditioning, once considered a luxury, is becoming necessary for health and productivity. But today, air conditioning is found in only 20% of all homes, concentrated mainly in higher-income households.
The challenges lower-income Brazilians face in accessing energy services like air conditioning are reflected in the fact that almost half of the lowest-income Brazilians spend more than half of their household income on electricity and gas.
Air conditioners above a Rio de Janeiro street.
Credit: CLASP
Brazil’s solution for booming energy demand and high electric bills
Brazil’s leaders increasingly view efficiency as a cost-effective, climate-friendly tool for meeting the country’s energy needs while addressing economic barriers to energy access.
Analysis reveals that, in the absence of other interventions, meeting skyrocketing energy demand would require increasing domestic natural gas production by up to 300%. To avoid this, the government can embrace energy efficiency, making services like cooking and cooling less energy-intensive and therefore reducing overall energy demand.
Appliance efficiency has provided early wins in Brazil, although there are major opportunities to do more. New policies for air conditioners and LED lights are making the models available in Brazil more efficient. This, in turn, makes these appliances more affordable to operate—and therefore accessible to more people.
COP host puts efficiency on the podium
In conversations throughout COP30, the Brazilian government and media showcased energy efficiency as a key tool for meeting national and global climate targets, growing the country’s economy, and delivering accessible energy services for all.
Panelists from COP30 Casa Civil energy efficiency event.
In his speech to negotiators and delegates at the COP’s opening plenary session, Brazilian Vice President Geraldo Alckmin underscored the importance of meeting the COP29 pledge to double energy efficiency by 2030. “This COP must mark the beginning of a decade of acceleration and delivery—the moment when rhetoric gives way to concrete action, and when all parties move from setting targets to fulfilling them,” he said.
During a day dedicated to energy efficiency, the Brazilian Agency for Industrial Development (often referred to by its Portuguese acronym, ABDI) put together a packed agenda bringing together leaders from government, businesses, and international organizations to discuss how Brazil can achieve its goals through efficiency. During a session about the role of efficiency in the energy transition, speakers noted that a significant advantage of efficiency compared to other solutions is that technologies like efficient industrial equipment already exist and can be implemented immediately.
Another event organized by Casa Civil, the powerful organization run by Brazil’s presidential chief of staff, focused on the role of efficiency in achieving a just energy transition and expanding the Brazilian industry’s presence in the global marketplace. The event highlighted the fact that local appliance manufacturers can increase sales by making their products more efficient, which allows them to match international benchmarks and sell their products around the world.
Major Brazilian media outlets also jumped into the efficiency conversation at COP. Folha de São Paulo, the country’s largest newspaper, co-hosted a session with the Crux Alliance, a philanthropic organization focused on global climate policy, on leveraging demand-side strategies to deliver on renewable energy and efficiency targets.
Carving a sustainable path forward
With COP delegates from around the globe now back home, they have many opportunities to keep energy efficiency front of mind—and strong reasons for doing so.
“Efficiency lowers costs, expands access, and strengthens domestic industry,” said Edilaine Camillo, leader of CLASP’s Brazil program. “The more elements we add to this puzzle, the clearer it becomes how interconnected the energy transition is—and how it can positively impact multiple sectors of the economy and people’s everyday lives.”
Efficient Appliances are a Powerful Tool for Creating Jobs and Growing Economies
As technological advances like artificial intelligence and advanced robotics reshape lives and economies around the world, it can be difficult to imagine living without even the most basic electronic devices: lights, for example. But today, this is the daily reality for millions of people.
In recent decades, governments and other actors have made significant progress in extending electricity to those who lack it, whether in the form of power grids, microgrids, or distributed solar. Today, the communities that remain without power are those that are the hardest to reach. Located primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, they’re cut off from the energy needed for economic development.
Emmanuel Aziebor, who leads CLASP’s Africa program, has spent years working on solutions to this challenge. He spoke to Marina Baur about the critical role of appliances in reducing poverty on the continent.
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Marina Baur: Globally, there are 666 million people who aren’t connected to the electric grid. More than a billion others are dealing with frequent power outages because their grids are unreliable. A lot of the people in both groups live in sub-Saharan Africa. Can you give us a sense of how the lack of reliable electricity shapes their lived reality?
Emmanuel Aziebor: Well, if you look at the data around electricity access in sub-Saharan Africa, some countries have much better statistics than others. In countries like Ghana and Kenya, over 70% of the population has electricity. But the reality is, if you go to any of these countries, there are still people with no access to even basic electricity. And by that, I mean they’re in darkness for much of the time; their only form of lighting is something like candles and kerosene lanterns. If they’re lucky, maybe they have a solar lamp.
Woman with solar lamp.
Credit: Steve Woodward
Many of these communities are only about a kilometer away from the nearest grid. This happens mostly as a result of what we can think of as geographical difficulties: Maybe the community is on an island, or maybe the location is very sparsely populated—most of the time, the government only electrifies communities that have at least a few hundred people. This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, since people leave those areas for the cities in order to get electricity and job opportunities.
So that’s one side of the energy access issue in Africa: Some people just don’t have electricity. Another side is that some people who are connected to the power grid can’t always rely on it when they need it. In countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, you still have a lot of blackouts. These happen in part because the utilities are in so much debt, which affects how efficiently they can operate.
Credit: Dreamstime
These blackouts don’t only affect people in their personal lives; they also affect businesses. We see this at CLASP. Our team in Nairobi works from home several days a week, but sometimes they have to come to the office anyway because of blackouts where they live. The office is the only place they’re sure they can get the electricity they need to be productive, because the generator in our building is always going to run.
People in all kinds of businesses are affected by electricity problems. Think about agriculture. Even though we have a lot of freshwater resources in Africa, it’s often hard for farmers to irrigate their crops because you need pumps to move that water and many farmers don’t have electricity to power those pumps. And if farmers can’t irrigate their crops, the crops don’t grow as well as they should, which keeps farmers’ incomes low and raises local food prices, which, in turn, impacts food security.
It’s also important to understand that people use energy to indirectly support their incomes. A long time ago, my father retired from the force and moved from the city to the village. That meant carrying all his appliances and everything to the village, where there was no electricity. So he bought a car battery to run this black-and-white TV. My mom started a bakery, and in the evening, people would come there to sit around and watch TV, and then they would buy bread and pastries as well. So that TV set indirectly contributed to my mom’s income. Without it, she would’ve earned less.
Baur: Thanks for that. CLASP believes that a significant percentage of the money devoted to building energy systems needs to be invested in appliances. That’s not a very intuitive idea; why do you think that’s important?
Aziebor: Well, electricity is like water flowing in a river. There are electrons all over the place, but they must be captured into usable form, and what makes that possible is appliances.
Let’s look at this issue from the macro level. Utilities set up generation plants and transmission systems to transfer those electrons to a point of distribution: a pole that is metered, with a wire that goes into a home. Currently, in the energy sector, we measure these poles and say things like, “We have connected 10,000 households to electricity.” But having that connection in your home doesn’t mean you can actually use those electrons. That can only happen through a device that draws that power and turns it into the services you need. That device could be a light bulb or a TV; it could be a fan or an air conditioner.
So the actual benefit of electricity only happens when people have appliances. And that’s actually true for the utility as well. If nobody uses the electrons they generate and transmit, utilities do not make profit. A lot of utilities in Africa are in debt, partly because people aren’t using the electricity that essentially just stops at the metering point.
The actual benefit of electricity only happens when people have appliances.Emmanuel Aziebor
This is what CLASP focuses on, and it has implications at every level of society. At the individual or household level, appliances can improve quality of life, reduce sicknesses, and improve incomes. For example, in very hot places like West Africa, it’s hard to sleep without an air conditioner or fan, and if you can’t sleep well, your quality of life and productivity suffer.
At the institutional level, if you, say, provide high-quality appliances in health clinics and hospitals, enabling things like reliable refrigeration of vaccines, the provision of healthcare improves. It also becomes more cost-effective because you’re not wasting valuable resources that you then have to buy more of.
And at the small business level, businesses that have appliances will be able to earn more profit. This is very important for economies in sub-Saharan Africa, since small and medium companies make up 95% of registered businesses in the region. Today, many of these businesses are struggling, for a wide variety of reasons. Having better access to devices that turn energy into the services they need could really be a game-changer.
So when you talk about community resilience, appliances play a major role. They help people access better information, higher incomes, and less sickness. Appliances are how we turn energy into opportunities, into comfort, into quality of life.
A cook at a Kenyan school uses an electronic cooker.
Credit: CLASP
This is a very important topic in Africa. But for a very long time, it hasn’t really been explained—even to government decisionmakers—from a strategic position.
Baur: What could African governments do to help more people access appliances? What types of interventions should they be thinking about when they decide where to spend money or what solutions to drive forward?
Aziebor: If you speak to African policymakers, the main things they’re concerned about are job creation and economic development. So that’s what we focus on.
Seventy percent of the population in sub-Saharan Africa is under 30, and many of these young people can’t find jobs. If they cannot get opportunities in-country, they move out, and then we see all this risk on the Mediterranean. So how can we encourage African governments to look at appliance access as a solution to that problem?
Basically, we say that one way to resolve issues around youth unemployment and economic development is to utilize the abundance of energy that is available. A lot of countries have installed grid capacity that is not being utilized. Well, what if we used that capacity to support rural enterprises? About 60% of the labor force in sub-Saharan Africa works in agriculture. So there are major opportunities there, and we already have a good idea of where interventions would do the most good. Most countries are mapped out into places where there is agricultural productivity, places where you can have agricultural processing. So we could say, “Okay, we know this area is good for rice production. Let’s get some irrigation systems into that area to produce more rice and get the youth involved in this business.” Then, we could encourage rice processing, which adds value—we can provide rice mills to help people get into that business. And then those workers would earn money that can be invested back into their businesses. So with appliances, governments can use energy to catalyze rural economic development.
A farmer sets up a solar-powered sprinkler near Siaya, Kenya.
Credit: Futurepump
Another thing governments can do is introduce regulations to make appliances run more efficiently and eventually lead to lower consumption of energy. This may seem like a contradiction: If utilities need people to use more energy in order to be profitable, why would governments want appliances to use less energy? Well, the issue in Africa is that inefficient appliances have been dumped here for a long time. They overconsume energy, which creates an inflated need for grid capacity. And then governments build generation capacity to meet these inflated projections, which creates a huge delta in capital investment relative to the actual need. As a result, they’re spending money on power grids that could’ve been invested elsewhere, like schools or hospitals or job creation. Making matters even worse, these big generation capacities put the utilities in even greater debt because there aren’t enough appliances to use them all.
So our hypothesis here is that if we introduce efficiency regulations into the appliance sector, it allows the government and utilities to right-size the grid and right-size their capital spending.
Baur: Can you give examples of where this kind of approach has been tried and found successful?
Aziebor: Well, if you look at appliance dumping, African leaders have been at the forefront of a lot of these initiatives. For a long time, companies have sent products they can no longer sell in other parts of the world to the continent. This was happening with fluorescent lighting, which is extremely toxic, and African policymakers pushed back, which was instrumental in getting global agreement to phase out the production of fluorescent bulbs.
Lighting policy workshop in Kenya.
Credit: CLASP
I haven’t seen a large-scale program for other appliances, but I will mention a related example. Some time ago, the national government in Ghana came up with a way to transition all urban communities from charcoal to LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) as a cooking fuel, because we have abundant natural gas resources and the use of charcoal was causing deforestation in rural communities. So what did they do? They basically set up a government-owned LPG cylinder manufacturing company. They said, “Everybody, you’re going to get a subsidized cylinder and your first LPG fill-up is going to be free.” They also used a portion of taxes from petrol sales to fund the LPG program. All that helped people get used to cooking with LPG, since cooking is so cultural.
This program has been running for more than more than 20 years. Now, if you go to urban homes in Ghana, every one has a gas cylinder that they are using.
So this is one clear example where at the national level, the government drove adoption. And we see successful examples all the time with other kinds of infrastructure. The government provides the funding to build the airport and we all pay for flights to keep it operating. The government builds the road and we all pay a toll to use it. So these things can be translated into conversations about appliances—how public capital could be used at scale to address a particular solution.
But one problem we have in the appliance sector in Africa is that there are too many Mickey Mouse pilot projects. The problem has always been around scaling.
That means the government needs to be involved. For a very long time, we’ve had the impression that the private sector and nonprofits are the most important partners in the appliance sector. The idea was that nonprofits bring the money to derisk the private sector. But we must flip this equation. To reach the scale we need, we need to bring government to the table very early on.
The government is a fulcrum around which we all must build. The nonprofit brings philanthropic capital, the private sector brings commercial capital, and governments bring public capital to scale. But if we are not looking at scale with that equation in mind, it becomes difficult. We must be intentional. We know solar water pumps work; we know green milling can become a conduit for local economic development. So how can we get governments to scale these solutions, creating national programs where they invest public money into resolving both job creation and access-related issues? That is where I think the conversation should be.
Women use a solar-powered mill in Nigeria.
Credit: CLASP
Take a company like SunCulture, which makes solar irrigation. So far, they’ve sold about 200,000 solar pumps, which is just a drop in the bucket compared to the need, even just in Kenya. But what if we were able to partner with the government of Kenya to say, “We’re going to put public money in the budget to support to every corn farmer in Kenya. All you need to go is to go to your district government, sign up, and then you get a subsidized solar water pump.” That is what we need to scale these solutions, and that is how the issues around jobs and incomes can be addressed.
I want to wake up one day and find that my nonprofit job no longer exists because this problem has been solved. That’s how I’ll know we’ve succeeded. But that requires that public capital and public partnership.
Interview edited and condensed.
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India Raises AC Efficiency Amid Growing Demand
India is facing hotter summers and more frequent heatwaves, making cooling essential for millions of households. About 110 million room air conditioners (ACs) are already in use in the country, which is expected to add another 130–150 million units over the next decade, making it one of the fastest-growing cooling markets in the world. The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts a ninefold rise in home AC ownership in the country by 2050. This growth could increase peak power demand by more than 180 gigawatts (GW) by 2035, putting significant strain on the power system.
Yet access to cooling remains highly unequal. Only about 8% of India’s 300 million households own an AC, with higher-income urban families accounting for most of this group. Rural AC ownership remains at around 1%, and the richest 10% of households hold the majority of ACs.
Why efficiency matters
Without stronger energy efficiency standards, the growth in AC ownership will lock in high energy use, drive up emissions, and increase household energy costs. Efficient ACs reduce electricity consumption, lower peak demand on the grid, and make cooling more affordable.
India’s energy labeling program has already helped buyers choose better-performing ACs and has shaped the market toward higher efficiency, but more can be done.
India’s new room AC efficiency standards
To meet the rising cooling demand, the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) in India has approved stringent efficiency standards for room ACs, effective January 2026, with further revisions in 2028, which will put India’s standards at global best levels. The standards establish minimum efficiency levels that appliances must meet, encouraging the use of more energy-efficient models.
By 2030, the new efficiency standards could reduce India’s peak electricity load by 8–10 GW, avoiding the need for more than 20 large coal power plants. Consumers could collectively save $12 billion on electricity bills annually, making cooling more affordable, especially for low and middle-income households. At the same time, they could help the country avoid up to 12 megatons (Mt) of CO₂ emissions annually.
India’s efficiency journey
The BEE has led India’s AC efficiency journey for nearly two decades. It introduced the star labeling system for room air conditioners in 2006 to remove inefficient appliances from the market and enable informed decision-making for consumers who might purchase high-efficiency products. Since then, baseline standards have been periodically tightened, resulting in a 43% energy efficiency improvement in ACs sold in the country. Inverter ACs, which are more energy-efficient, now dominate the domestic market, and companies have adopted a default temperature of 24°C to save energy.
These standards advance the goals of the India Cooling Action Plan (ICAP), which targets a 20–25% reduction in cooling demand by 2037–38 through efficient appliances, sustainable refrigerants, and improved building design.
By promoting efficient cooling, India is managing energy use, strengthening resilience against extreme heat, protecting public health, and creating jobs in manufacturing, testing, and supply chains.
Data-driven support for stronger standards
CLASP supported BEE by providing robust, evidence-based analysis to ensure that the new standards are both ambitious and achievable. It built clear evidence through product tests and an analysis of the Indian market, demonstrating that upgraded standards were both technically achievable and practical. It conducted affordability and feasibility studies and reviewed global pricing trends. It also assessed the financial performance of publicly listed companies and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). The analysis confirmed that higher efficiency was financially viable. By providing this evidence, CLASP helped ensure that the revised standards are technically sound, cost-effective, and aligned with India’s goals of reducing electricity demand, emissions, and consumer costs.
India’s approach shows that fast-growing economies can expand access to cooling without harming the environment. Higher efficiency will also spur the adoption of next-generation ACs, creating new jobs in manufacturing, design, and testing, and contributing to economic growth.
Just How Bad Is Air Conditioning for the Climate—and What Can We Do About It?
As the planet warms, air conditioning is becoming a critical necessity in much of the world. But common AC technologies have an outsized climate impact, driving temperatures even higher.
Ana Maria Carreño has spent years working to disrupt this cycle. As CLASP’s senior director of climate, she identifies and implements solutions for keeping people cool without heating up the planet.
In this interview with CLASP’s Sarah Wesseler, she discusses AC’s mitigation challenges and what it would take to solve them.
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Sarah Wesseler: The links between climate change and air conditioning have been widely covered in the media. It’s a complex problem, though, and I suspect most climate advocates don’t have a nuanced understanding of it, let alone a sense of how to solve it. What do you see as the most important things to understand about reducing emissions from ACs?
Ana Maria Carreño: Well, first of all, you have to reduce the demand for artificial cooling. But that doesn’t mean asking people to live with excess heat. Instead, it means changing the way we design cities and buildings.
If you look at places built before modern HVAC [heating, ventilation, and air conditioning] equipment was invented, they’re highly responsive to their local climates. In hot places, design solutions like shade and natural ventilation kept people comfortable even during the summer. Things like large porches, internal courtyards, and trees kept direct sunlight out of building interiors, for example. Even something as simple as light-colored roofs that reflect heat away from buildings can make a huge difference.
Today, a lot of this nuance has been lost. You can find essentially the same types of buildings and neighborhoods being built in very different climates, which leads to unnecessarily huge air conditioning loads. It also means more heating is needed in the winter, but that’s another story.
So we need to go back to this older model of working with local environmental conditions to create places that are comfortable in hot weather even without air conditioning.
There’s a lot of really interesting work happening on this front. For example, in Colombia, where I’m from, the city of Medellín has had a lot of success in reducing heat by planting trees on busy streets to create shade. The program has really made a difference, lowering local temperatures by 2º degrees Celsius (3.6º Fahrenheit).
So reducing the demand for mechanical cooling is the first step. And then once we get that as low as it can go, we need to meet the remaining demand in a way that’s as climate-friendly as possible. That means paying close attention to electricity and refrigerants, which are the two main sources of emissions.
The electricity emissions come from burning fossil fuels in places where the electricity used by ACs is produced with oil, gas, or coal. Because a lot of electricity is produced this way, ACs are indirectly responsible for a large volume of emissions. That’s why it’s important to use efficient equipment. As we reduce the amount of energy needed to run ACs, we can reduce the amount of fossil fuels burned.
Refrigerants are also really important. They’re classified in terms of their global warming potential, which is extremely high for some refrigerants. One of the most common ones used in air conditioners, R-410A, is 2,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
The world is moving away from refrigerants that have high global warming potential, but that transition is not happening as fast as it should. The transition is being driven by commitments many countries made under the Kigali Amendment of the Montreal Protocol to phase down and phase out these refrigerants. But national regulations are needed to speed the process, and in many countries there is no regulation.
Wesseler: OK, so electricity use and refrigerants make ACs problematic from a climate perspective. How problematic, specifically? How much of a climate risk does AC pose?
Carreño: Well, data from CLASP’s appliance efficiency policy model, Mepsy, show that the projected emissions in 2030 from room air conditioners alone—so not counting any other type of space cooling, like fans—are about 800 megatons, which is almost a gigaton. That’s roughly equivalent to driving 186 million gasoline-powered cars for a year.
We’ve also found that, to achieve net zero scenarios by 2050, emissions from the entire appliance sector need to fall by nine gigatons by 2050. So when you consider that room air conditioners will reach one gigaton of emissions in 2030, that tells you the magnitude of the challenge AC poses for the climate community.
Credit: Shutterstock
What makes this even more difficult is that, at the same time that we need to reduce emissions from AC, we need to help more people get access to air conditioners.
For many years, the efficiency community talked about air conditioners being a luxury—something that was only for households with the capacity to purchase the equipment and pay high electricity bills. But now summers are becoming so hot in many places that it’s almost impossible to stay healthy, to work, to study without AC. But there’s still very low access to air conditioning in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
Brazil is a good example. Only 20% of households there own an air conditioner—most people use fans for cooling since they’re cheaper than AC. But the summers are becoming hotter and hotter. This year, the temperature reached 44° Celsius (111° Fahrenheit) in Rio de Janeiro. In heat like that, fans are no longer enough to keep people cool.
Brazil actually set a new record for air conditioner sales in 2024 because of the growing heat. There were six million new ACs sold, which is a 38% increase from 2023.
Air conditioners above a Rio de Janeiro street. Credit: CLASP
This same kind of growth is happening in other countries as well. The IEA (International Energy Agency) has forecast that demand for cooling will triple by 2050.
Wesseler: You mentioned that regulations are critical to reducing the climate impact of ACs. What kinds of regulations are most effective?
Carreño: National governments have various policy options. The most popular, and the most effective, are energy efficiency standards. With standards, governments essentially say, “All ACs sold in this country have to operate above this specific level of efficiency.”
Of course, there’s more to it than simply setting the efficiency level. The policy has to be widely communicated to industry—manufacturers, importers, and others—and there have to be mechanisms for testing and certifying products for compliance. But in general, standards are a relatively simple and very effective tool for removing the least-efficient products from the market.
Another important policy is labeling. Labels are a consumer-facing tool; you use them to inform consumers about the different levels of performance of the equipment available on the market. So if you’re interested in purchasing an appliance that uses less energy, that has less impact on the climate, you can easily identify those products using this simple label system.
Brazilian air conditioner energy efficiency label. Credit: CLASP
Some governments also use incentives to promote the purchase of more efficient appliances. Public procurement is a very good incentive. Many governments purchase massive amounts of equipment for official buildings, for municipalities. When policymakers require high efficiency and low climate impact as part of this process, that incentivizes manufacturers and importers to bring in more equipment that meets those criteria. It’s an important lever.
Governments can also provide incentives to help consumers replace obsolete appliances they already own. There are a lot of examples of replacement programs for refrigerators, for instance.
Governments can also support local industry in upgrading appliance production lines. This is something CLASP is looking into in Brazil and India. Brazil produces about 90% of the air conditioners used in the country, and it already has good efficiency standards, but the idea is to support the domestic production of high-efficiency equipment and continue raising the level of ambition. We’re working with the Brazilian Agency for Industrial Development to incorporate energy efficiency into its programs. That’s turning out to be a very, very interesting program.
Wesseler: So it sounds like AC policy can be a win/win for the public and private sectors—it’s not necessarily punitive for manufacturers.
Carreño: Yeah, and this is a really important point. In general, countries’ AC policies are led by countries’ ministries of energy. Reducing energy demand and improving energy security is front and center for these ministries, of course, but they also assess the impacts of these policies on industry and consumers. And that means that policies cannot increase the price of the equipment for consumers or impact local manufacturing. That’s a challenge, because when you improve AC policies, sometimes local manufacturing is going to be impacted. So it’s important to work with local industries so they can continue to be competitive. In some cases, these upgrades can improve their competitiveness in export markets, too.
But this is the main challenge for AC policy in many of these countries. For many years, it’s the reason why policy progress has been slow.
Wesseler: Which countries are doing the most interesting things on AC policy today?
Carreño: China has the current world-leading standard for air conditioners, and the government is looking to go even farther. It’s trying to improve the technology itself, investing in research and development with the goal of doubling the efficiency of cooling equipment. The idea is that when that technology is available, that higher level of efficiency will become the new policy standard. So China is really pushing the envelope.
Brazil is another good example of where policy has really shifted the market to efficient products. For many years, Brazil didn’t revise its AC policies, but this has changed, partly because of efforts by the advocacy community in Brazil. So when the new AC label was published five years ago, followed by a new standard two years later, it really shifted the market to very efficient products.
India is also interesting. The government essentially sets up a schedule that gives manufacturers notice on what efficiency levels they need to reach in future years, helping them understand how policies will change over time. I think that’s a very good practice.
Residential buildings in Kolkata, India. Credit: Shutterstock
Wesseler: We’ve talked about national-level policymakers and manufacturers. Are those the main actors determining the future of air conditioning? Or are there other important nodes of influence?
Carreño: Well, policymakers are critical for advancing cooling efficiency, and in CLASP’s work they are an important stakeholder. Industry has the capacity to invest in innovation and producing the next generation of ACs, so it’s critical. And some of the interventions CLASP is working on focus on creating a policy environment that enables this kind of investment. We’re also looking at how global supply chains affect the cost of producing efficient AC units and their components, understanding that manufacturers need to keep prices down in order to stay competitive.
Things work differently on the refrigerants side. Ideally, air conditioner standards would also set requirements for refrigerant global warming potential, but ministries of energy are usually the ones that set those standards, and they don’t deal with refrigerants. That falls under the implementation of the Montreal Protocol, which is under the ministry of environment’s remit. But there are efforts to bring these issues together and help agencies collaborate.
Wesseler: You mentioned CLASP’s efforts. It sounds like, in addition to governments and industry, the nonprofit sector is also an important node of influence on this issue.
Carreño: Yeah. There’s a large community of organizations working in this space, striving to provide governments with the best research and technical evidence so that they can advance cooling policy, and identifying solutions for manufacturers and consumers as well.
Wesseler: What about people who don’t work in this space but want to do something about global warming? Let’s say somebody volunteers with a climate group like 350.org or the Sunrise Movement. What are some ways individual climate activists can influence what happens on this massive global issue?
Carreño: Participating in public consultations—for example, attending a meeting about building code standards or government incentive programs—can make a real difference. It can also help people understand the impacts of policies like these on their own communities.
This kind of advocacy is critical, because governments need to get feedback that this is an issue that’s important to their constituents. The more voices at the table the better.
Interview edited and condensed.
Making Climate Action Work for Africa’s Development
Excerpts from this article first appeared in Business Daily Africa in the lead-up to the second Africa Climate Summit in 2025.
By centering climate responses within Africa’s development needs, the continent can unlock new investments, boost incomes, and enhance its resilience. As leaders gather in Addis Ababa for the Africa Climate Summit, the continent must define a bold narrative that strategically links climate action with development progress.
Climate change should not be a global emergency that Africa is simply signing up to solve. This crisis is already costing Africa billions every year, and an estimated 110 million people have been directly affected by climate-related hazards.
Climate action can and must be made to work for Africa by recasting it through an Africa-centered development lens. Responses to the climate crisis offer Africa an opportunity to leverage climate solutions and sustainable technologies to increase incomes, accelerate poverty reduction, and improve adaptation and resilience.
African and global leaders will be converging at the second Africa Climate Summit in Ethiopia from 5 to 10 September. When we gather in Addis Ababa, we must use the Summit as a platform to drive bold reforms and ambitious actions that can repurpose climate change solutions to address Africa’s core development imperatives.
Framing climate action as an opportunity for Africa’s development
Income growth and poverty reduction remain as Africa’s core development pathway, the rising tide that promises improvements across all other social, economic and political indicators.
Africa’s income growth and poverty reduction needs are clear. The average GDP per capita of Sub-Saharan Africa was $1,506 USD in 2024, 40% lower than middle-income countries, and 90% lower than upper upper-middle-income countries. The continent’s GDP grew by 3.3% in 2024. That annual growth rate must increase to approximately 19% on average for GDP per capita to double by 2030. The continent’s GDP must multiply seven times over for African countries to reach middle-income country status.
The pathway to income growth and poverty reduction is equally clear. Africa must increase investments several-fold to drive economic growth, create new jobs, increase productivity, improve competitiveness and enhance social services. Sustained economic growth will result in higher incomes, delivering the poverty reductions that are urgently needed.
Climate change response strategies can be repurposed to meet Africa’s income growth and poverty reduction goals in two ways. First, climate solutions can free up investments, which can then be more productively deployed to drive economic growth. Second, climate solutions can be used to reduce climate vulnerability, improve adaptation, resilience and enable sustained economic growth.
Climate solutions can free up investments for economic growth
Energy efficiency can help secure the emissions reductions that the world needs to achieve to minimize the harshest impacts of the climate emergency. Improving energy efficiency also means lower utility bills for consumers and businesses, and less demand on power grids for governments. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that Africa currently uses 3.7 gigajoules (GJ) of energy for every thousand USD of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). By transitioning to a higher efficiency of 2.7 GJ per thousand USD of GDP by 2030, consistent with IEA’s net zero emissions pathway, Africa could save billions through avoided energy and infrastructure costs. These avoided investments could then be productively deployed for economic and income growth in areas where they are needed.
Climate solutions can reduce climate vulnerability
Climate change is already costing Africa 2-5% of its GDP, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) estimated. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, that translates to approximately $ 40 – $100 billion USD of lost incomes in 2023 – money that could have been utilized to enhance economic growth or support social services.
Africa bears a disproportionately large share of climate impacts because the poor and vulnerable are the least prepared to face climate vulnerabilities when they occur. The WMO projects that by 2030, 118 million extremely poor people in Africa will remain highly vulnerable to climate impacts such as heat stress, droughts and floods.
Energy-efficient appliances, such as lights, fans, air-conditioners, refrigerators, electric cookers, water pumps, cold storages, and milling equipment, are crucial to building adaptive capacity and resilience to climate change among the world’s most vulnerable populations. CLASP estimates that more than half of the population in Africa lacks access to many essential appliances, such as fans and refrigerators. There are equally large ownership gaps for agricultural equipment, such as water pumps, milling equipment and cold storage. These appliances are critical to helping reduce the risks of income and productivity losses from climate impacts.
CLASP estimates that increasing access to seven key appliances across Africa could create a market worth approximately $50 billion USD and catalyse accelerated power infrastructure development to provide electricity for all. It would improve people’s access to essential services, helping individuals manage environmental stressors and economic instability.
Climate change was not Africa’s making, but it is Africa’s fight to shape. If leaders gathering at the Africa Climate Summit in Ethiopia can reframe the response to the climate crisis as an opportunity to accelerate income growth and poverty reduction, then climate action will not only protect the vulnerable but also power the continent’s prosperity. The future is not about choosing between climate action and development; it is about making climate action the very centre of Africa’s development.
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A Game-Changing Climate Solution, Hiding in Plain Sight
With less than five years to meet 2030 Paris Agreement targets, climate advocates are searching for ways to rapidly cut emissions in order to prevent the worst outcomes of climate change. Christine Egan, CLASP’s chief executive officer, believes that one of the most powerful, pragmatic solutions available comes down to something most people take for granted: appliances.
In this interview with CLASP’s Sarah Wesseler, Egan discusses the transformative potential of appliance efficiency policy.
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Sarah Wesseler: When we hear about climate solutions in the news, the focus is typically on things like solar panels and electric vehicles. Appliance efficiency tends to be a very niche topic. How do you think about appliance efficiency policy in relation to other mitigation solutions? What do you think is an appropriate way to prioritize it?
Christine Egan: You’re right that it doesn’t get much attention, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. In the countries where appliance efficiency policies have been in place the longest, those policies reduce energy-related CO2 emissions by around 10% compared to what would happen without them. And they could achieve much, much more—appliances are responsible for just shy of 40% of all energy-related emissions. So it’s really staggering how far this solution could get us.
But appliance energy efficiency tends to be invisible, so people don’t usually hear much about it. There isn’t a ribbon-cutting ceremony in front of a more efficient appliance. And as a concept, it’s harder to wrap your head around than the solar panels or electric vehicles you might see in your neighborhood every day.
I often say that appliance energy efficiency policy is like the bonds in your retirement account. Bonds have historically provided a safe, steady return that’s really critical over time, particularly if the stock market fluctuates. In the climate field, appliance efficiency policy provides that same safe and steady return. There are higher-risk, higher-reward solutions, of course, and they tend to generate a lot more buzz, but they’re more uncertain.
Take carbon sequestration. We’re absolutely going to need carbon sequestration to hit climate targets, but we don’t really know how to do it at scale yet. Right now, we need smart venture capitalists investing in the right tech, but we don’t know when a viable solution will be ready.
It’s the same story for industrial decarbonization, which is an incredibly complex challenge. Right now, governments aren’t providing enough incentives for industry to actually clean itself up. But beyond that, there are a lot of problems inherent in the materials and processes involved.
Look at cement, which we basically can’t build anything without. Making cement is incredibly carbon-intensive—the average US plant emits three-quarters of a ton of CO2 for every ton of cement it produces. Three-quarters of a ton! So we absolutely need to address this, but for now, there’s no easy solution. It’s still a technology challenge, a business model challenge, and a policy challenge.
Now compare this to appliance efficiency, which has already been successfully deployed around the world. We have the tech, the tools, and the policies we need to scale it up more. We know it works.
Christine Egan, center right, speaks with Ghanaian energy minister Matthew Opoku Prempeh at the 2023 Africa Climate Summit.
Credit: CLASP
And the reason it works is that appliances use so much energy, cumulatively. Just by using efficient light bulbs or a best-in-class refrigerator, individuals can make a difference; it’s one of the ways everyone can have a positive impact on the climate. But the appliances people can buy are only as good as the appliance policies in their country. If their government is lagging on this issue, as many are, they may not even have the option to choose climate-friendly models. Stores might not stock them at all.
It’s also important to understand that appliance efficiency is really critical to enabling other climate solutions. As we continue to transition the grid to renewable energy and electrify transportation and buildings, we simply won’t have enough capacity to power all these things unless they’re very efficient. If you want to actually achieve a transition to electric vehicles, you’ll need grid space for charging them. So that grid space can’t all be going to air conditioners and refrigerators, right? There’s simply a limit to how big a power grid we can build.
Another important benefit of appliance efficiency policy is that it’s much easier and cheaper than most mitigation solutions. It ultimately boils down to a few fairly simple, low-cost actions. The first is requiring that all appliances sold in a given place meet a minimum efficiency standard; the second is labeling them so consumers understand how well different models perform. Governments can do a lot more, of course, but fundamentally, that’s what it comes down to.
CLASP's Anne Muhonja Songole (left) and Angellah Wekongo examine a Kenyan energy efficiency label in a Nairobi appliance store.
Credit: CLASP
And implementing these two things isn’t rocket science, especially because there are already so many efficient appliances out there today, and so many examples of strong policies that governments can borrow from.
I should clarify that when CLASP talks about appliances, we’re not only referring to domestic appliances. We work broadly across demand-side energy reduction, which also encompasses things like industrial motors. Products like these consume a massive amount of energy, so they also need strong efficiency regulations.
So for all these reasons, it’s important to implement appliance efficiency policy while you figure out the more difficult climate solutions. In a noisy world, it’s a very practical, focused, implementable, measurable, and meaningful thing to do.
Wesseler: You said some countries are already seeing big emissions reductions from appliance efficiency policy. Where is that happening? Who are the leaders?
Egan: Well, India is an incredible success story. Last year, their appliance efficiency policies and LED lighting promotion programs accounted for 60% of the emissions reductions from energy efficiency in the whole country.
Delhi, India.
Credit: Shutterstock
And then historically, the top three countries in terms of emissions reductions from appliance policy have been the US, the EU, and China.
The US has been a really good example up to now, although the current administration is changing course. But appliance policies have prevented billions of tons of CO2 emissions in the US. They also cut utility bills by $63 billion in 2015 alone. That’s a lot of money back in consumers’ pockets just because the devices they use are more efficient.
And in China, appliance efficiency policies reduce CO2 emissions by about 100 million tons every year. In the EU, ecodesign and labeling programs cut more than 300 million tons of CO2 in 2019.
But really, anywhere in the world that has appliance policy, the numbers are massive in terms of how much emissions are being prevented, how much energy is being saved, and how much customers are saving on their utility bills.
One way to think about mitigation from appliance efficiency policy is that when you set these policies, you start by getting data on the energy consumption of all the products in the market. You then make a distribution curve of the lowest-energy-consuming products, the medium-consuming products, all the way up to the highest. To set a standard, you just literally add in a line cutting out a chunk of that distribution curve.
This can eliminate a sizable fraction of the products on the market, which shifts that market toward more energy-efficient products. It has a real, quantifiable effect on what consumers buy and, as a result, how much energy they use.
Compare this with carbon credits, where there are fears of greenwashing and you hear a lot of questions like, “Is it measurable? Is it verifiable?”
Well, appliance efficiency policy is measurable and verifiable. In the complicated world of policymaking, where it’s so hard to know exactly what policies achieve, this is not complicated. That’s one of the great advantages of the work we do.
If we’re going to prevent the worst consequences of climate change, we don’t have time to waste. Every swing of the bat has to matter, and appliance efficiency policy is one hell of a swing.
Interview edited and condensed.
Appliance Efficiency Finally Recognized in National Climate Commitments
National climate commitments are being submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) this year as part of the Paris Climate Agreement. Early trends reveal good news for efficiency advocates—so far, country submissions are integrating appliance energy efficiency at a higher rate than previous years. In this third round, the national climate commitments called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs 3.0) were to be submitted to the UNFCCC Secretariat by February 2025. CLASP experts show that of the 20 submissions so far, 15 include appliances. This is a noticeable shift from the previous two rounds of submissions where appliance efficiency was mentioned in less than half of all NDCs—despite being a proven, cost-effective climate mitigation solution.
A quick recap on NDCs
All parties to the Paris Climate Agreement were instructed to submit their third round of NDCs by February 2025. The first Global Stocktake, which assessed collective progress towards the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels, sent a clear message: we are woefully off track. To catch up, countries need to slash emissions faster and set more ambitious targets in their NDCs.
Increasing the energy efficiency of appliances, lighting, and equipment is a way to reduce emissions at pace.
Appliances account for 39% of all energy-related CO2 emissions. Improving their efficiency will not only reduce energy demand and climate emissions, it will also help build community resilience to extreme heat, boost food security and productivity, and enhance economic and social development for people using appliances for the first time.
CLASP has been working with governments and partners around the world to raise awareness of this opportunity and provide the techincal expertise to put appliance efficiency solutions into action.
Early indicator: Better than before with room to improve
CLASP ran an initial key-word search on the 20 submitted NDCs 3.0 in April 2025 to see if and how appliances are being leveraged in this iteration of commitments.
Here are three key takeaways:
1. 75% of NDCs 3.0 mention appliance energy efficiency
A vast majorty of the 20 countries that have submitted their NDCs 3.0 have included appliance efficiency (Figure 1).
These fifteen early submitters, including the previous and current UNFCCC Conference of Parties (COP) hosts and presidents, may be more proactive to demonstrate leadership and increased ambitions. For example, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the host of COP28, was the first country to submit NDC 3.0, followed by Brazil, which will hold the presidency of COP30 this year. Other countries submitting NDCs early or on time may do so for political and practical reasons such as demonstrating climate leadership, building momentum, or attracting financial and strategic support in implementation.
It is too early to say if this trend will hold with the remaining 175 parties yet to submit this round of NDCs.
Figure 1: 75% of NDCs 3.0 mention appliances
2. Appliance efficiency is mentioned without concrete actions to achieve it
While most NDCs mention appliance energy efficiency, almost all fail to provide specific targets or detail the interventions or policies that are needed to achieve the stated commitments. For example, 50% of NDCs 3.0 mention policies to improve appliance efficiency, but only 10% mention specific appliance efficiency targets (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Mentions of appliances and energy efficiency in NDCs 3.0
NDCs are meant to be holistic. While it may be challenging to present a detailed roadmap for how each sub-sector will contribute to economy-wide emissions reduction targets, providing more detail about the types of interventions and policies that will be prioritized can clarify how emissions reductions will be achieved.
Zimbabwe’s NDC 3.0 offers a good example of how to address this nuance. It is noted that the country intends to prioritize minimum energy performance standards for domestic refrigeration, distribution transformers, room air conditioners, and lighting equipment and it also provides quantifiable electricity savings targets.
Similarly, the United Kingdom’s NDC 3.0 mentions low-carbon space heating equipment and specifically calls out policies and programs that promote adoption of heat pumps and encourages manufacturers to meet low carbon heating sales targets.
3. Countries are prioritizing cooling appliances, with most focusing on transitioning to low GWP refrigerants
As heatwaves become more frequent and intense, demand for cooling services is expected to surge, straining electricity grids and driving up emissions. Cooling appliances like air conditioners and refrigerators contribute to both direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions.
Refrigerants are powerful heat-trapping substances that are directly emitted during cooling appliance operation, servicing and disposal. The Montreal Protocol and subsequent amendments aim to phase out the use of certain refrigerants that harm the ozone layer and contribute to global warming.
Cooling appliances are also large consumers of electricity, producing indirect emissions from power generation. Policies like minimum energy performance standards are often used to curb electricity demand by limiting the amount of electricity an appliance can consume.
To meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, cooling appliances’ direct and indirect emissions must be addressed in tandem.
CLASP found that ten of the 20 submitted NDCs 3.0 prioritize cooling appliances (air conditioners or refrigerators), see Figure 3.
Figure 3: Appliances in NDCs 3.0
Our analysis found that most countries are prioritizing direct emissions from cooling appliances. Six of the ten NDCs that prioritize cooling appliances mention a transition to low global warming potential (GWP) refrigerants in alignment with international conventions like the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol.
Just three of the ten NDCs featuring cooling appliances stated that they would prioritize energy efficiency, highlighting a critical gap.
The majority of parties to the Paris Agreement have yet to submit their NDC. Countries should consider targets that incorporate and prioritize both the direct and indirect emissions from cooling appliances.
One example of good practice that other countries could build upon is the United Arab Emirates, which prioritizes a transition to low GWP refrigerants and more efficient cooling appliances in its NDC 3.0. The country reaffirmed its commitment to phasing down fluorinated greenhouse gases (F-gases), and outlined plans to expand its appliance efficiency programs by annually updating standards for existing appliances, such as ACs, and introducing new standards for other appliances.
What’s next for NDCs 3.0?
CLASP’s initial review of submitted NDCs 3.0 shows promise: while NDCs remain vague, mentions of appliance have increased and countries are focusing on high impact technologies like cooling. However, 175 parties to the Paris Agreement still need to submit their revised NDC in 2025.
With COP30 rapidly approaching, governments should continue to carry this positive momentum in their efforts to finalize NDCs. Prioritizing appliance efficiency in NDCs through clear regulation and measurable targets will be key to cutting appliance energy demand and slashing emissions at a pace aligning with net-zero goals.
CLASP’s free resources to support governments
CLASP has several resources to support governments integrate appliance efficiency into their NDCs.
Our Net Zero Appliances NDC toolkit helps policymakers discover the many benefits a stronger focus on appliance efficiency can deliver, source recommendations for including appliance efficiency in NDCs 3.0, learn how appliance efficiency has been included in current NDCs, and view two illustrative examples of how it could be included in NDCs 3.0.
We also provide bespoke technical advisory services. Please contact ndcs@clasp.ngo for support.
Solar Appliances, a Sustainable Development Success Story, Need Support to Scale
When there’s no electricity to power the appliances essential to wellbeing and prosperity, what’s a community to do?
In sub-Saharan Africa, the answer is often turning to kerosene and diesel to run everything from lights to farm equipment. But fossil fuels are expensive and polluting. Reliance on these energy sources leads to a host of negative impacts across the region, from financial stress to lower crop yields.
David Wanjau, a Kenyan entrepreneur and rabbit farmer who trained as a scientist, spent six years watching this issue play out across sub-Saharan Africa while working at a nonprofit focused on food security. The experience changed his life.
“I noticed that every farmer we were supporting did not have access to electricity,” he said. “So I stopped what I was doing to focus on energy access and become an agent of change in these communities.”
Today, Wanjau leads Nairobi-based distributor Deevabits Green Energy, a small business that’s one of more than 200 companies working to expand solar energy access to the hundreds of millions of people in Africa who lack access to the electric grid.
Deevabits began by selling solar lights, but customers soon began asking for more. “They wanted solutions that could be used for their businesses: for cooling drinks, or for meat preservation,” Wanjau said. So his team decided to start stocking solar-powered refrigerators.
Deevabits founder David Wanjau in his company’s warehouse in Nairobi, Kenya.
CLASP
“Our company now wants to be on the forefront of providing energy efficient, standalone productive-use [i.e., income-generating] appliances,” he explained. “We just need to position ourselves to be able to tap into this big market.”
Meeting high demand for cooling and other energy services
Sales of solar appliances more than tripled between 2018 and 2023 as new manufacturers and distributors entered the sector, according to Leave No One Behind: Bridging the Energy Access Gap with Innovative Off-Grid Solar Solutions, a 2024 report published by the Efficiency for Access coalition. (CLASP co-manages the coalition with Energy Saving Trust, a UK-based nonprofit.)
The business potential is tremendous. The report’s modeling shows that if everyone who needs solar appliances could purchase them, the market value would reach $58 billion USD.
“It’s a huge market opportunity,” said Peter Wangila, Kenya operations and finance manager at SureChill, a manufacturer selling solar fridges in over ten African countries. The company’s patented battery-less design reduces the need for maintenance over the fridges’ lifespan and eliminates the need for expensive battery replacements.
“We’ve done over 1,000 installations, but we haven’t even scratched the surface. There’s a high demand for cooling,” Wangila said.
We’ve done over 1,000 installations, but we haven’t even scratched the surface. There's a high demand for cooling.Peter Wangila
SureChill
Today, sales cover less than 2% of the estimated global demand for solar appliances. It’s a gap that has remained frustratingly difficult to bridge, said CLASP’s Nyamolo Abagi, a coauthor of Leave No One Behind.
“Here in sub-Saharan Africa, 60% of households still do not own a refrigerator, an essential appliance for preserving food that is almost ubiquitous in homes across the Global North. This is a classic example of energy poverty,” she said. “The solar appliance sector has to grow rapidly in both scale and ambition in order to serve this enormous need.”
Solar appliances are a gamechanger for small businesses
Most solar fridge customers live in rural areas with no grid access. Deevabits’ customers are typically small shopkeepers selling cold beverages—water, juice, milk, yogurt, and soda—to parched customers. “In very hot areas, cold drinks are a luxury,” said Wanjau. “That’s why for shops, these fridges are gamechangers.”
The company also serves clients in the medical and food retail sectors. Clinics use solar-powered fridges to keep vaccines and medicines cold, explained Wanjau, while fish traders see fridges as a safer way to preserve their wares than the traditional drying or deep frying.
Meanwhile, butchers tend to use the freezer setting on the Deevabits model to reduce waste. Before acquiring these appliances, “they would hang their meat, and it would go bad after two or three days,” Wanjau said. “Now people can stock larger volumes and sell it for a whole week.”
CLASP
CLASP
SureChill works with a similar clientele. “We primarily target productive-use customers: someone with a small shop or someone in the homemade juice business,” said Wangila. “They do not have a lot of money, but they make enough to be able to support a fridge. They are able to see the positive financial impact that owning a fridge could have on their business.”
For most shopkeepers, a solar fridge can significantly boost revenue. “It attracts more customers,” Wangila explained. “And if they buy a cold beverage, those customers will also buy something else, which increases overall sales for the business.”
Increased income for a shopkeeper has ripple effects within families and communities, he added. “It benefits them and four or five other people. That’s how our communities work.”
A shop with a solar refrigerator.
CLASP
SureChill also serves the medical field, offering World Health Organization–approved vaccine fridges, in addition to cost-effective alternatives designed to store temperature-sensitive medications when power is unavailable.
The challenge of scaling up
Despite the advantages such appliances offer, many companies in the sector struggle to scale.
“Compared to a product like lights, productive-use appliances like these are energy-intensive, specialized, and expensive,” noted CLASP’s Abagi. “Fewer consumers can afford them, and the distribution model is more complicated. This makes the growth of companies trying to sell these bigger solar appliances slow.”
Cost is a major barrier. Many people would like to have solar refrigerators at home, but with prices up to $1,800 USD per unit (85% of the average annual household income in Kenya), they typically can’t afford them. “People want the fridge, but they then say, ‘Oh my goodness, it’s so expensive!’” explained Wanjau.
Appliances’ sheer weight and bulk also make it difficult to attract new customers through tactics like door-to-door sales. “You have to get people to believe that a solar fridge works,” said Wangila. “So when salespeople can’t carry it around, it’s a big challenge.”
Wanjau agrees. “When people are not aware of the product, they don’t demand it. They don’t have a reference point for a solar-powered fridge, so they need to see it—maybe feel the chill, take a cold soda from it.”
CLASP
CLASP
Companies like his participate in roadshows and market exhibitions required to build this awareness, but this costs money, ultimately driving up the price of their appliances.
Innovating to improve affordability
Solar appliance companies have been searching for ways to make their products more affordable for low-income customers. Both Deevabits and SureChill sell fridges on a rent-to-own basis, using internet-connected devices that activate the fridge when customers make weekly or monthly mobile money payments. This model enables shopkeepers to own their fridges after several years, allowing them to benefit from cooling without tying down their capital.
John Odongo, finance manager at Deevabits, explains how a Pay-go payment enabling device works.
CLASP
Another payment innovation is cooling-as-a-service (CaaS), in which customers lease appliances indefinitely. But despite its potential to bring down costs, both companies have found CaaS challenging to implement on the ground. “The way people use those fridges can be very unpredictable,” noted Wanjau. “If someone stops using it, how do you take it back? How can you resell it if it’s dirty and the butchers were cutting meat on top of it?”
In both cases, Wangila added, the risk of default is high. “That money is competing with school fees and medication when a family member falls sick. We try to mitigate this by telling them to pay more when business is good, to cover for the dry season.” But, he said, “even if you do very good customer selection, there are always people who will default.”
Stimulating growth
Ultimately, said Abagi, companies like Deevabits and SureChill need a more supportive environment to help bridge Africa’s yawning energy service gap. While they provide a crucial service, they can’t meet the overwhelming demand on their own.
“We need innovators, but we also need to attract incumbent manufacturers who have more resources,” she said. “Governments have a role to play in terms of better regulations and lower tariffs, and we also need development partners to help with long-term, consistent subsidies.”
Wangila and Wanjau point to the importance of grant funding in developing their own businesses. Both companies have benefitted from CLASP market activation grants, which help small businesses meet costs associated with product sales, marketing, distribution, and delivery in remote areas.
“Grants can be a sort of non-dilutive funding to help people scale,” said Wanjau. “A lot of these [solar appliance companies] are locally owned businesses, and grants could really stimulate their growth.”
Despite the challenges they face, both men are confident that solar appliances are the clean energy solution Africa needs.
“We are so blessed to have a lot of sun, so the future is bright,” Wangila insisted. “It’s just a question of maintaining focus and getting the right support in place.”
Appliance Efficiency Can Supercharge National Climate Plans
At the heart of the Paris Climate Agreement lie country-specific climate plans developed by governments around the world, officially known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs. The third iteration of these plans, due this year, will play a key role in determining whether the world hits critical 2030 climate targets.
In the first two rounds, one powerful tool for reducing emissions—appliance efficiency—was notably underutilized. CLASP is working to change this for NDC 3.0, providing a toolkit to help policymakers incorporate appliances into their 2025 NDCs.
Lauren Boucher, a Washington, DC–based member of CLASP’s research team, led the creation of the toolkit. She spoke with CLASP editor Sarah Wesseler about the importance of appliance efficiency in climate mitigation and the role of national climate plans in achieving it.
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Sarah Wesseler: I want to start by zooming out to the big picture of efficiency in climate mitigation. In climate media, we hear a lot about the need to transition away from fossil fuels, but not as much about the need to use energy more effectively, regardless of the source. Does this reflect the actual mitigation potential of renewable energy compared to efficiency? Where does efficiency actually fit in?
Lauren Boucher: It’s true that efficiency is often left out of conversations about the energy transition, but that’s definitely not because the two things are unrelated, or because renewables are inherently more important.
One way to think about it is that when we ignore energy efficiency, we’re making the transition to renewables harder and more expensive.
I’ll back up and give some more context. In 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed, the international community set a formal target of limiting warming to no more than two degrees, and also agreed that NDCs would be the mechanism for reaching net zero emissions by 2050. But most people working on climate change didn’t know exactly what this should look like in practice. What, specifically, did countries need to do to hit the two-degree target?
One of the leading organizations that’s been helping to answer these questions is the IEA [International Energy Agency]. In 2021, it put out a really influential report showing that reaching net zero would require the world to triple its renewable energy capacity, but also double the pace at which efficiency improves every year.
People sometimes look at the doubling energy efficiency and tripling renewable energy targets as two distinct goals, but they’re actually fundamentally intertwined. Efficiency measures reduce overall energy demand, which allows the share of renewables in a country’s energy mix to grow faster.
It’s also important to think about the doubling efficiency target in the context of the global economy. Historically, when a country’s standard of living has improved, its energy consumption has risen significantly. Obviously, we want to see living standards around the world continue to rise, particularly in places where people can’t meet their basic needs today. But we don’t want to use more energy in the process, since that would mean needing to build even more renewables—which isn’t always easy—or continuing to use fossil fuels.
The IPCC’s [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] modeling addresses this issue by showing that we need to decouple economic growth from emissions. The idea is that the world needs to use the same amount of energy, or ideally even less, to produce more goods and services. So energy efficiency enables us to achieve both climate change mitigation and economic development.
This is even more important because the world isn’t on track to meet the tripling target. A lot of countries have made real progress in building more renewables, but globally, we’re not where we need to be.
When we ignore energy efficiency, we’re making the transition to renewables harder and more expensive.Lauren Boucher
Wesseler: Where do appliances come into this picture? Why focus on appliance efficiency specifically?
Boucher: Well, it’s important to note that when people in the energy sector talk about appliances, they’re actually referring to a much wider range of things than you might think. CLASP specializes in appliances, but our scope isn’t limited to domestic products like dishwashers and refrigerators—we also work on industrial motors, lighting, space heating and cooling equipment, et cetera. Basically, for energy experts, appliances is a catch-all term for products on the demand side of the energy equation.
So when you talk about efficiency, you have to talk about appliances. Products like fans, refrigerators, motors, and streetlights are everywhere—they work silently in the background of our lives to make them easier, safer, and more convenient.
And when you tally up the emissions produced by all these things, it really adds up. In fact, the appliance sector is responsible for about 40% of all energy-related CO2 emissions globally.
The upside of all this is that, because these products are so ubiquitous, appliance efficiency is an incredibly powerful climate solution with a ton of co-benefits. In places where the grid is powered by fossil fuels, improving appliance efficiency leads to significant emissions reductions and also improves outdoor air quality. But there are benefits even in areas with a cleaner energy supply—lower bills for consumers, for instance, and reduced strain on electric grids. Efficiency also helps more people afford appliances like refrigerators and air conditioners, which are really vital for adaptation and economic development. So appliance efficiency is a true win–win for everyone.
And the good news is, we already know how to make appliances more efficient. Policy mechanisms like standards and labeling have been delivering results around the world for decades. We know they work.
These policies are also extremely cost-effective, which is particularly crucial in a world of limited climate finance. CLASP has data showing that in terms of administrative costs, you can reduce tons of emissions for pennies. And the IEA has shown that the benefits of standards and labeling programs outweigh the costs by a margin of four to one.
So, in short, the energy transition depends on balancing energy supply and demand, and appliance efficiency is one of the cheapest, smartest ways to do that. But unfortunately, we’re off track in making that a reality.
Wesseler: How far off track are we talking?
Boucher: Well, NDCs can help us understand this, since they provide detailed information about national priorities. CLASP ran keyword searches on the first two rounds of NDCs, which were submitted in 2015 and 2020/21. The results clearly showed that countries haven’t been prioritizing appliance efficiency enough. More than half of them didn’t mention appliances at all, and the ones that did established pretty underwhelming efficiency targets, if they had them at all.
There is a lot of variation from country to country, though. Some governments have clear, quantifiable efficiency targets for specific appliances in NDCs, while others take a more general approach, like just saying they’ll improve the efficiency of air conditioners. And it’s possible that some countries considered appliance efficiency when setting their targets for overall emissions reductions, but didn’t mention it in the final NDC text.
But as a whole, NDCs certainly haven’t been ambitious enough to hit net zero emissions by 2050. CLASP published a report in 2023 that identified specific energy efficiency targets for ten key appliances, which we call the Net Zero Heroes. Hitting those targets would get the appliance sector very close to net zero by 2050, but what we’re seeing in NDCs, and in practice, is far from that.
Wesseler: So what’s the solution? What advice would you give to policymakers who are working on their 2025 NDCs?
Boucher: Every country can take real, meaningful action on appliance efficiency. Countries that currently have limited appliance efficiency policies can put in place strong regulatory frameworks and adopt robust standards that prevent technology lock-in of energy-hogging appliances. This would create a ton of benefits within those countries: lower energy demand for the nation as a whole and reduced energy bills for consumers, plus protection against international manufacturers’ dumping practices that leave people stuck with outdated, inefficient appliances.
But countries with strong regulations can also do more. Our analyses clearly show that even some of the most stringent appliance efficiency requirements currently in place are not enough to reach net zero. Motors and air conditioners, in particular, need a lot of work to hit Net Zero Hero targets. The leading countries should continue to push the envelope and regularly update their regulations for these and other appliances, charting a path for others to follow.
There’s so much more juice to squeeze from appliance efficiency, and all governments should take advantage of that.
CLASP's Net Zero Appliances NDC Toolkit helps governments incorporate climate-friendly targets for appliance efficiency into Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement.