The world’s climate is changing faster than we can keep up with it. With the first El Nino in four years under way, hot and dry conditions are spreading across areas where a huge share of the world’s population lives: South and Southeast Asia, northern China, southern Africa and the tropical Americas.
The effects are already starting to strain infrastructure that was not built for such conditions. At the Koyana Dam southeast of Mumbai, India, one of the country’s largest hydroelectric projects has gone into partial shutdown to preserve its dwindling reservoir for drinking water.
Similar conditions are prevailing across India’s southern Kerala state. In Malaysia, the government has been flying cloud-seeding planes to refill two dams that keep Penang state supplied.
Water in Europe’s Rhine River is already dipping, threatening a repeat of last year’s drought that halted one of Europe’s major transport arteries, while the lake that feeds the Panama Canal in Central America is heading to its lowest levels on record.
In China, which produces about one-third of the world’s hydroelectricity, year-to-date power output from the country’s dams last month fell to the lowest level since 2014.
That is despite a spate of dam-building over the past decade that should allow the country to generate one-quarter more.
Those problems are only going to increase if aridity persists through the rest of the season. Simultaneous increases in summer temperatures and incomes mean that air-conditioning use is surging. Emerging economies such as China, India, Indonesia and the Philippines could lead the addition of 1 billion units globally this decade, but they are not the only ones.
In Europe, where fewer than 10 percent of households have air conditioners, Daikin Industries Ltd has predicted its sales of the devices would increase 23 percent over the coming fiscal year.
That risks thwarting much of the progress being made on decarbonizing the world’s electrical grids. The sheer scale of peak electricity demand in summer is outstripping the availability of renewable power to meet it, causing governments to fall back on coal as the only means of keeping the lights on.
That is particularly the case because global warming is raising nighttime temperatures faster than those during daylight hours — precisely the opposite pattern that can harness the explosive boom in solar power.
China’s stockpile of solid fuel has increased more than fivefold since September 2021, leaving its reserves alone in excess of volumes produced in Europe or the US during an entire year.
India’s increased 44 percent from a year earlier by the middle of this month, even as coal-fired generation rose at a more sedate 5.1 percent pace.
This activity to boost power is treating the symptoms, rather than the cause. What businesses and households want are buildings cool enough for people to live comfortably in. Throwing more electrons at the problem is too blunt a tool to work for long, especially if they are generated by burning fossil fuels.
A better solution is batteries — but not the sort used to charge cellphones. Instead, the entire building should be treated as a heat battery.
With better building materials and insulation, and using air-conditioning to cool the walls and air during the heat of the day when solar output is at the maximum, it is possible to drastically reduce the need for overnight cooling.
Utilizing thick cinder blocks instead of poured cement for walls, and adding window shading can reduce energy consumption by up to 40 percent, the Indian Bureau of Energy Efficiency said.
Painting roofs white also helps, one expedient being encouraged by the Indian government.
Far too little is being done. Demand-side management, where smart meters allow utilities to switch cooling equipment on and off to match supply of electricity from their generators, is still relatively rare everywhere — despite that it can cut power consumption in the heat by one-quarter. Consumers welcome it, as long as they receive discounts on their bills and an override button.
Such restrictions are already accepted in other areas of life. Parts of southeast England are to ban the use of hosepipes later this month, as drinking water stocks run low.
Smart meters that allow demand-side management are already being rolled out in some Indian states to help with chronic underpayment of bills. The solar water pump program that India introduced to farmers in recent years works in a similar way by cutting irrigation loads on the grid.
The fitful implementation of such programs needs to speed up to avoid future hot weather energy crises. Global warming is altering the nature of power demand in the summer, and it is not possible to outrun its pace of change.
To keep cool on a heating planet, people need to make the most of the infrastructure that already exists.
David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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