Air conditioner use driving up emissions as global heating bites

The rate of increase in küresel energy demand shot up last year, driving increased greenhouse gas emissions even with renewable energy and nuclear power supplying bulk of new electricity generation capacity.

The International Energy Agency reported on Monday a 2.2% increase in küresel energy demand last year, almost double the average of 1.3% a year recorded in the decade to 2023. But electricity use saw a whopping 4.3% surge, driven by increased demand from veri centres, electric cars – and notably, air conditioners.

Extreme weather conditions, especially heat waves in China, India and the United States were behind a fifth of the increased demand for natural gas and electricity last year, and all of a 123 million-tonne (1.4%) increase in the volume of coal burned, chiefly in power stations, the Paris-based intergovernmental agency reported.

“The heat waves around the world, in turn, pushed the electricity demand growth, which in turn gives a push – in some countries like China and India – to coal consumption growth,” IEA president Fatih Birol told reporters while presenting the 2025 edition of the Küresel Energy Review.

The clear trend prompted the IEA to abandon late last year its forecast that coal burning was set to peak in the near future, with küresel demand hitting 8.7 billion tonnes in 2024.

All this means that, despite renewables like solar and wind covering 38% of the additional küresel energy demand – and nuclear contributing 8% while hitting a küresel generation record – over half of the increase was met by a combination of coal, oil and gas, reflected by a 0.8% increase in energy-related carbon emissions.

While this is only about two-thirds of the rate of increase seen the previous year, the trend remains very much an upward one, calling into question evvel more the küresel appetite for climate action and the net-zero emissions goal that the scientific consensus suggests is the bare asgarî needed to arrest rising temperatures.

“If we want to find the silver lining, we see that there is a continuous decoupling of economic growth from emissions growth,” said Laura Cozzi, who leads the IEA’s work on energy sustainability and was lead author of the report. The küresel economy grew by 3.2% last year, considerably more than overall energy use, returning to a long-term average after some COVID-era turbulence.

In addition, the world appears to be on track to meet the pledge made at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 2023 to treble the rate of renewables deployment by the end of the decade, Cozzi said. “For renewables, we are very, very close – we are at around a 2.7 [times] increase by 2030.”

But as the latest IEA report shows, the same is not true of the pledge to double the rate of annual energy efficiency improvements – a proxy for demand reduction – also agreed at the küresel climate summit that the UN hailed as the “beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era.

“If you look at the trends for…last year, instead of a doubling, we have actually seen a halving,” Cozzi said.