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Air conditioners become hot European commodity

"Our busiest months are usually June and July. This year it's been all summer long."

Christophe Mutz, marketing director for the French unit of Daikin

About five years ago, Jacques Cazaban decided he couldn't take the heat. Yet he wanted to stay in the kitchen all the same.

So Cazaban, 58, who runs a medical equipment business in Bordeaux, paid the equivalent of about US$1,700 for a home air-conditioner.

In the US, almost three of every four homes has some kind of air-conditioning. In Europe, people have traditionally just slowed down and baked in summer. But with the arrival of this summer's heat wave, fans and air-conditioners have been leaping off appliance store shelves. And Cazaban has been delighted with his investment.

"It's indispensable," he said by phone recently, as the worst heat wave in decades continued to wither Europe.

While air-conditioner sales in the US have been fairly stable in recent years, they have grown in Europe by more than 10 percent a year.

The engine of this growth is in part the global economy, which is forcing more and more Europeans to work summers. But Europeans have also come to know the benefits of air-conditioning in offices and in their cars and decided they want it at home, too. Sniffing a trend, air-conditioner manufacturers, most notably producers of inexpensive units from Japan, South Korea and China, have flooded the market with affordable models well adapted to small European homes.

Now, this year's seemingly endless heat wave has given the market a huge lift.

"Our busiest months are usually June and July," said Christophe Mutz, marketing director in Paris for the French unit of Daikin of Japan. "This year it's been all summer long."

Not surprisingly, most air-conditioner makers are viewing Europe as a potential El Dorado.

Daikin, Mutz said in a telephone interview, originally projected a growth in sales of about 8 to 10 percent for this year, compared to growth rates of 15 percent and more in recent years, based on early weather forecasts and the generally weak economy.

"Now we are thinking more than 20 percent for the whole year," he said. Demand has been strongest for residential units, he said, while sales have been relatively weak to commercial customers, who apparently feel cool enough in the general economic chill.

To be sure, hurdles to the spread of air-conditioning remain. Both air-conditioners and the power to run them are costly, and there are serious moves in the European Union to curtail both energy use and the gases traditionally used as coolants. Moreover, many Europeans continue to harbor a bias against air-conditioning; some consider it unhealthy, while others say, why not rely on nature?

But as temperatures climbed across Europe, French researchers, echoing warnings from environmental officials elsewhere in Europe, argued that air-conditioners, while cooling the air in homes, force out warm air, raising temperatures outside. Moreover, they said, the devices can contain ozone-depleting gases that contribute to global warming if released into the atmosphere.

"There are several big disadvantages," said Jean-Louis Plazy, deputy director for air and transportation at the French government's Agency for the Environment and Energy Conservation, in Nantes. "For one, there's energy consumption; to produce one calorie of cold, you have to generate three calories of heat. And there's the greenhouse effect, which is linked to emissions."

Makers of air-conditioners are scrambling to find substitutes for chlorofluorocarbons, gases traditionally used as refrigerants. They were banned by the Montreal Protocol, a 1987 treaty signed by more than 150 countries, because the gases deplete the earth's ozone layer. Mutz of Daikin said that EU rules required the replacement of the gas in conventional air-conditioners this year, and in heat pumps, which can both heat and cool living spaces, by January of next year. All of Daikin's equipment meets the new norms, he said.

But France, joining a trend throughout Europe, wants to go a step further, Plazy said. By next year, the government hopes to have in place changes to building codes that will require architects and builders to help limit the use of energy both in winter and summer.
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