Cooling in a Warming World

As the climate warms, demand for cooling rises — a need that can either drive more emissions or, with clean firm power, be met without them.

A dangerous feedback

Cooling is becoming a matter of survival in more places each decade. But if the electricity for air conditioning and refrigeration comes from combustion, cooling drives the very warming that makes it necessary — a feedback that worsens over time. Breaking that loop requires the cooling to run on clean power.

This is squarely in the firm-power role fusion is studied for: steady demand, often at night and through heat waves when it is most acute, in dense urban areas near where people live. A clean source that runs regardless of weather is well matched to cooling loads that peak exactly when strain is highest.

Kept honest

Fusion cannot help with today's heat waves; the machines are design and simulation studies with FOAK first tritium targeted around 2030 and scale far beyond. Present cooling demand must be met by the clean sources available now. Fusion's relevance is to the growing cooling demand of coming decades, if it earns its place.

The point is structural: cooling need not accelerate warming if its energy is clean and firm. See powering society cleanly and grid resilience.