To Beat the Heat, We’ll Need to Turn Our Homes Into Batteries

Two EV battery packs. (Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg)

Written by
David Fickling
Written by

David Fickling

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(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The world's climate is changing faster than we can keep up with it. With the first El Nino in four years now 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 wasn't built for such conditions. At the Koyana Dam southeast of Mumbai, one of India's largest hydroelectric projects has gone into partial shutdown to preserve its dwindling reservoir for drinking water. Similar conditions are prevailing across southern Kerala state. In Malaysia, the government has been flying cloud-seeding planes to refill two dams that keep Penang supplied.

Water in the Rhine 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 is heading to its lowest levels on record. In China, which produces about a third of the world's hydroelectricity, year-to-date power output from the country's dams in May fell to the lowest level since 2014. That's despite a spate of dam-building over the past decade that should allow the country to generate a quarter more now.

Those problems are only going to increase if the current aridity persists through the rest of the season. Simultaneous increases in summer temperatures and incomes mean that air conditioning use is surging. Emerging countries such as India, China, Indonesia and the Philippines will lead the addition of 1 billion units globally this decade, but they're not the only ones. In Europe, where fewer than 10% of households have air conditioners, Daikin Industries Ltd. predicts its sales of the devices will increase 23% 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's particularly the case because global warming is raising night-time temperatures faster than those during daylight hours — precisely the opposite pattern that would allow you to 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% from a year earlier by mid-June, even as coal-fired generation rose at a more sedate 5.1% pace.

All this activity to boost power is treating the symptoms, rather than the cause. What businesses and households want are buildings cool enough for us to live comfortably in them. Throwing more electrons at the problem is too blunt a tool to work for long, especially if they're generated by burning fossil fuels.

A better solution is batteries — but not the sort you can use to charge your phone. 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's possible to drastically reduce the need for overnight cooling. Utilizing thick cinder blocks instead of poured cement for walls and adding window shading can help reduce energy consumption by up to 40%, according to India's energy efficiency regulator. Even painting roofs white will help, one expedient being encouraged by the 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 the fact that it can cut power consumption in the heat by a 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 will ban usage 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 under payment of bills. The solar water pump program that India has 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 if we're to avoid future hot weather energy crises. Global warming is altering the nature of power demand in the summer, and we'll lose if we try to outrun its pace of change. To keep our cool on a heating planet, we're going to need to make the most of the infrastructure we already have.