Status Quo of the Air-Conditioning Market in Europe: Assessment of the Building Stock

This study fills in knowledge gaps for the European air-conditioning (AC) market, which is fundamentally important to raising awareness about primary energy utilization. In contrast to space heating (SH) and domestic hot water (DHW) preparation, the European Union (EU) AC market is barely explored in scientific literature. While the focus of previous research has been on the residential sector, a shortfall of data for the services (wholesale and retail, offices, education, health, hotels and bars) exists. In this paper, data describing the actual space cooling (SC) market in Europe (quantity of SC units, equivalent full-load hours, installed capacities, seasonal energy efficiency values as well as cooled floor area per AC type and/or sector) is collected and explored using a bottom-up approach. Results indicate that SC is responsible for a significant portion of EU electricity consumption in households (nearly 5%) and even more in the service sector (~13%). Energy consumption for SC in the EU28 appears to be more than 140 TWh/y. The quantification of the European AC consumption shows a significant difference between the service and residential sectors: about 115 versus 25 TWh/y respectively. The SC market in Europe is characterized by a high potential for growth, especially in households.

We would like to convey our deepest appreciation to the Horizon 2020 Hotmaps Project (Grant Agreement No. 723677), which provided the funding to carry out the present investigation. We are thankful to Pierre Iachetti (Eurac Research), who edited the entire text of the present investigation. Finally, our gratitude goes to Amy Segata (Eurac Research) for designing the graphs of this study.