Bridging the Cooling Gap: Energy Efficiency as a Driver for Appliance Access

Summary

Improving cooling appliance efficiency can lower costs, expand access, and enhance climate resilience. By modeling the impacts of efficiency improvements, this paper offers critical insights into policies needed to accelerate adoption and achieve net zero goals.

This research is posted preprint and will be published in the EEDAL’24 Book of Proceedings.

Energy efficient cooling appliances play a critical role in addressing climate resilience and cooling equity. This new research investigates how doubling the energy efficiency of cooling technologies globally can reduce lifecycle costs, expand appliance access, and limit energy demand growth. It focuses on three high-impact, low-access countries: India, Indonesia, and Nigeria and evaluates the impact of efficiency improvements on affordability, ownership, and climate adaptation, offering critical insights into policies needed to close access gaps and achieve net zero goals.

Key Findings

Doubling the efficiency of fans, refrigerators, and room air conditioners globally by 2030 could unlock great benefits. By 2050, in the three countries studied, this could:

  • Drive down the total cost of ownership by 60% for room air conditioners and refrigerators and 58% for fans
  • Deliver $105 billion USD in annual net consumer benefits in 2050
  • Expand access by an additional 4-13 percentage points
  • Avoid more than 420,000 premature deaths
  • Limit the total energy consumed by these appliances to less than 50% of what it would be otherwise

Recommendations

To realize these benefits, governments and other market actors must:

  • Increase research and development funding, financing and financial incentives, bulk procurement schemes, awards, and informational tools to drive market uptake of efficient appliances
  • Implement innovative financing schemes to reduce upfront costs
  • Reduce tariffs to make efficient appliances more affordable locally
  • Expand decentralized energy solutions, like solar home systems and mini-grids to help rural, low-income communities access energy services more readily

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