India is blocking a cheap way to beat the heat wave, one tweak in AC can lower costs

Keeping 1.4 billion people cool in 47 degree Celsius (116 degree Fahrenheit) heat was never going to be easy. In India, it’s about to get a whole lot harder.

A heat wave that’s baking the subcontinent sent electricity demand soaring last week, as tens of millions of air conditioners cranked up to take the edge off intolerable temperatures. Generation hit an all-time high of 256.1 gigawatts mid-afternoon on April 25. That’s about double the peak level in the early 2010s, and the hottest months of the year are still to come.

As recently as 2006, there were just two million AC units in the entire country. Only 10% of homes have one installed at present. With incomes rising and temperatures soaring, that’s changing fast. Last year, 15.4 million were sold, and volumes will almost double to 28 million by 2030.

All those units are putting immense pressure on the grid. Already, cooling is pulling about 50 GW of electricity at peak times. By 2035, that could rise to 180 GW. To give you a sense of the scale of that: Accommodating the rise of Indian air conditioners over the coming decade will require twice as much generation capacity as will be needed for new US data centers.

If this sounds daunting, there’s good news: A relatively simple tweak to AC design could slash those numbers, while also lowering costs for Indian households and reducing the impact of climate-warming gases. The hitch? Right now, it’s effectively outlawed.

To understand why, you have to look at the fluids running through the pipes of our refrigerators and air conditioners. They’re an under-appreciated contributor to climate change: About 12% of the increase in greenhouse gases since 2019 has come from F-gases, a group of chemicals that do a good job of shifting heat around but are bad for the atmosphere. A metric ton of R32, the gas most commonly used in Indian air conditioners, has the same warming effect as 675 metric tons of CO2.

This might seem a reasonable price to pay. India and other emerging economies have very little responsibility for climate change, so deserve some slack in getting hold of the tools to lessen its effects.

There’s a better option out there, though. Propane — the same stuff you find in a gas bottle for domestic heaters, stoves or barbecues — can also be used as an AC refrigerant, where it’s known as R290. It’s a far less damaging greenhouse gas, equivalent to just three tons of CO2, and is drastically cheaper to buy.

Best of all, it’s more efficient at using power: You need only about three-quarters of the electricity to get the same cooling effect from a unit using propane, relative to one using R32, according to one 2024 study by Indian researchers. That lowers costs for households, as well as helping grid managers cope with the growth in AC usage. Just switching gases could reduce peak electrical demand in 2035 by tens of gigawatts, equivalent to all the power stations in Switzerland or the Philippines.

Why, then, isn’t it more widely used?

Propane is highly flammable, and standards in India have forced it to be used in such small quantities that it can’t counter the intense heat of the South Asian summer. A 2022 rules revision at the international standards body for such devices tripled the amount that could be used, sufficient to turn propane from a niche to a mass-market refrigerant. But though the European Union and China are already switching at speed, India is only gradually switching from the older, more restrictive standard.

That’s perverse when you consider all the ways New Delhi encourages propane usage. Bottled LPG has been at the heart of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaign to modernize cooking. A standard LPG bottle contains 15 times more gas than would be allowed in an Indian AC unit, and tragic accidents are legion. Within the past few months alone, two children were killed when a LPG blast near Chennai leveled three homes, two more died when gas bottles exploded at a garment factory in Gujarat, and five perished after an explosion tore apart two houses in Andhra Pradesh.

The claimed safety risks of propane in AC, meanwhile, are largely theoretical. With more than 10 million R290 units already installed, we’re yet to see cases of fire outbreaks. One 2024 study estimated that you’d get just one every three years from a fleet of 10 billion R290 air conditioners — five times more than all the AC units on the planet right now.

It makes little sense for New Delhi to be slow-walking the use of propane in AC while it encourages it in cooking stoves. The world’s most populous nation is being exposed daily to the burning heat of a warming planet. That’s a far more serious danger than the imagined risk of an exploding air conditioner.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)