In Paris, young people jump into the Canal Saint-Martin, not as an act of rebellion but because the city has quietly accepted what the heat already made obvious: when temperatures climb towards 40C, people will look for water wherever they can find it. Near the capital, in a top-floor flat described to the Guardian as “like a furnace”, a single mother worries less about summer comfort than about whether her child can sleep, study or stay healthy through another suffocating night. In Madrid’s El Rastro, a 22-year-old visitor tells Reuters she is dressed entirely in white and carries a small electric fan everywhere she goes.
These are not exceptional scenes anymore. They are fragments of a new European summer: canals becoming public relief, apartments turning into heat traps, handheld fans becoming urban accessories, and local governments improvising systems of care for those most at risk. Behind them lies a structural problem Europe has been slow to name. The continent that built its energy politics around winter is entering an age in which cooling may become as important as heating.
For decades, Europe worried about gas storage, insulation, boilers, heating bills and the right to keep homes warm. Now another question is moving from private discomfort to public policy: how will Europe keep cool, and who will be able to afford it?
The International Energy Agency warned as early as 2018 that cooling was one of the great blind spots of global energy policy. At the time, there were around 1.6bn air conditioners in use worldwide. By 2050, the IEA projected that number could rise to 5.6bn — roughly 10 new units sold every second for three decades. Electricity demand from air conditioning, it warned, could more than triple.
Europe once seemed partly outside that story. Not anymore. The June 2026 heatwave broke records across the continent: Paris reached 40.9C, Britain and Switzerland set new June temperature records, thousands of schools were closed, and hospitals and emergency services came under pressure. As temperatures rose, so did demand for cooling. Reuters reported that air-conditioner sales were surging across Europe, with online sales in Germany up 37% in May and shipments to Spain and France doubling from the previous year.
The spread of air conditioning is often described as a consumer trend. That is misleading. Cooling is becoming infrastructure. It is about health, productivity, housing, urban design and the electricity grid. A fan or air conditioner in a private apartment may look like an individual choice, but millions of such choices made at the same time become a public energy problem.
The dilemma is obvious. Air conditioning can save lives during heatwaves. But if it spreads through inefficient units installed in poorly adapted buildings, it can drive up electricity demand precisely when power systems are already under stress. During the 2026 heatwave, European electricity prices spiked as cooling demand rose, wind output fell in some areas and heat affected parts of the energy system. In Britain, power imports became unusually expensive; in France, high river temperatures affected nuclear output. Cooling, in other words, is not just a matter of comfort. It can become a peak-demand problem.
That does not mean Europe should reject air conditioning. The moralism around cooling is increasingly outdated. A society that recognises the right to warmth in winter must begin to think seriously about the right to safe coolness in summer. But the answer cannot simply be to buy more machines. The European Environment Agency has argued that sustainable cooling must start with buildings: deep renovation, external shading, better ventilation, reflective surfaces, green spaces and passive design can reduce heat stress while lowering energy use. This matters because Europe’s building stock is old, inefficient and slow to change. The same renovation agenda once framed around winter heating now has to be rethought for summer survival.
There is also a justice question. Cooling poverty may become the next frontier of energy poverty. Poorer households are more likely to live in hotter, less efficient homes and less likely to afford high-quality cooling or the electricity bills that come with it. If Europe cools only its wealthier districts, it will not be adapting to climate change. It will be reproducing inequality under hotter skies.
The old energy question was how to survive winter without freezing. The new one is how to survive summer without overheating the planet. Europe will cool. The political choice is whether it does so badly, expensively and unequally, or whether it treats cooling as what it has become: one of the central energy-policy challenges of a warming century.
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