Cooling the heatwave: where is France with air conditioning?

Q: How many air conditioners are sold in France?

A: The equipment rate is increasing: it stood at 25% in 2020 compared to 14% in 2016, according to the Ecological Transition Agency Ademe.

In 10 years, from 2013 to 2023, annual sales of individual heat pumps (HPs), which serve as both heating and air conditioning, have tripled, to 1,2 million devices: more than 910.000 air-to-air HPs (+13% over one year), 307.000 air-to-water HPs (-14%) and 3.500 geothermal HPs (+18%), according to the Ministry of Ecological Transition.

The most popular are air-to-air heat pumps, which produce forced air using refrigerant fluids and an external station that extracts calories from the air.

"People understand that it's no longer a luxury, and they're also investing in heating," Stéphane Vivet, an installer in Taverny, in the Val d'Oise region, told AFP.

According to Uniclima, a federation of industrial manufacturers, sales of air-to-water heat pumps nevertheless fell in 2024 and early 2025 "since the elimination of MaPrimeRénov' subsidies" for this type of equipment. This slowdown was also due to "the crisis in new construction," Vivet points out.

At the same time, nearly 3 million portable air conditioners (with an exhaust hose towards the windows) and fans were sold each year between 2019 and 2022, according to Laurent Cours, director of studies and statistics at Gifam, which brings together household appliance manufacturers, but "10 times fewer portable air conditioners are sold than fans each year."

Q: Where is air conditioning most common?

A: The level of equipment of individuals varies greatly depending on the region, but also depending on the type of accommodation.

Air conditioning is much more widespread in individual houses, as it is complex to implement in collective housing, and even more so in city centers like Paris: the regulations of the Architects of Buildings of France (ABF) prohibit this type of equipment on Haussmannian facades, underlines a representative of Uniclima.

Then, it is clearly more present in the south of the country: "in Brittany or Normandy, the equipment rate is around 10%, while it rises to almost 50% around the Mediterranean," underlines André Mounier, doctoral student at the international research center on the environment and development (Cired).

For portable air conditioners, the purchasing decision is "particularly linked to heat waves," while for heat pumps, which are more complex to install, "no one makes a decision unless they have needed one in the previous years," adds Mr. Mounier.

Q: What are the disadvantages of air conditioning?

A: The main problem with air conditioning, according to the High Council for Climate (HCC), is that its rapid growth and the excess energy consumed also increase CO2 emissions, which in turn... warm the climate.

Emissions from air conditioning in buildings (residential and tertiary) in France, calculated over the entire life cycle of this equipment, reached 2,5 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2023, compared to less than 10.000 tonnes per year before 1996, underlines the HCC, which denounces a risk of "maladaptation" of the country to global warming, particularly in terms of energy consumption.

"Air conditioning isn't horrible," said engineer Jean-Marc Jancovici, president of the Think Tank Project, a think tank campaigning for the decarbonization of the economy, on BFM TV. This is particularly true because the electricity consumption it generates during the day can be covered by photovoltaic production, not to mention that more than two-thirds of the electricity produced in France is of nuclear origin, which is carbon-free.

On the other hand, "if we have a lot of air conditioning everywhere, it creates excess heat in the street" and increases the risk of urban heat islands, he emphasizes: "air conditioning is like a refrigerator in reverse, a refrigerator cools the beer and heats the kitchen, air conditioning cools the kitchen and heats the outside."

According to a 2020 study by the CNRS, Météo-France, the Ecole des Ponts Paris-Tech and Cired, if the entire Paris region used air conditioning during a heatwave, the temperature in the streets would increase by 2,4°C.

Illustrative image of the article via Depositphotos.com.