Should air conditioning be limited this summer to reduce the environmental consequences? To this question, the Minister for the Ecological Transition, Amélie de Montchalin, questioned on Sunday June 5 on LCI, simply called on the French to “to be sober”.
To what temperature should, for example, the air conditioning be set this summer? Amélie de Montchalin did not give details or instructions. “First of all, I believe that many French people do not have air conditioners in their homes”she ended up arguing, preferring to recall the need that “housing is built differently, that it is isolated“.
I call on French people who have air conditioning to use common sense in their use: protection of the vulnerable first! My challenge is to accelerate the national effort of energy renovation of housing to put an end to thermal sieves. #TheGrandJury pic.twitter.com/qSGoUqU1ci
— Amelie de Montchalin (@AdeMontchalin) June 5, 2022
According to Ademe, the Environment and Energy Management Agency, 25% of homes were equipped with air conditioning, according to one study.survey carried out in the summer of 2020 by CODA Strategies among 800 households. In detail, a good half have wall-mounted air conditioners, while the other half have mobile air conditioners. Although only a quarter of households are equipped, this varies quite logically depending on the place of residence. Thus, only 11% of Bretons have air conditioning, compared to 47% of the inhabitants of the South-East and Corsica. There is also more air conditioning in homeowners than in apartments.
While Amélie de Montchalin is right to say that few homes have an air conditioning system, she fails to mention that their number has increased significantly in recent years. Ademe thus explains that “the equipment rate is constantly increasing“: we have gone from 14% of households equipped in 2016 to 25% in 2020, an increase of almost ten points in just four years. Ademe specifies that in 2020, “for the first time“, we sold more than 800,000 devices while the average had long remained at 350,000 sales per year. For Ademe, “the multiplication of heatwaves in recent years has led to a boom in air conditioning equipment markets and, consequently, in household and business equipment rates”.
Above all, Ademe considers that “Air conditioning therefore now weighs significantly in national energy consumption and in CO2 emissions”.
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To discover here on the ADEME bookstore https://t.co/YVtYXcI4C9 pic.twitter.com/vHFmxJob4q— ADEME (@ademe) June 4, 2022
Air conditioning devices therefore have an impact on the environment. Firstly because they consume electricity, then because air conditioners contain refrigerants which “contribute strongly to the emission of greenhouse gases”explains the Agency.
If we add air conditioning in private homes and in the tertiary sector, comfort air conditioning as it is called still represents 5% of CO2 emissions in the building sector, specifies Ademe.