Home air conditioning, the use of air conditioning grows
(Sustainabilityenvironment.com) – There is a growing need in Europe for cooling buildings, while the need for heating them is decreasing. The global warming is felt even so, change over time the trends of home air conditioning. This is revealed by Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Commission, by publishing data on the heating degrees day (HDD – Heating Degree Days). What are they? An index of the thermal demand for heating of homes in a given location and in a given period. At the numerical level they represent the cumulative sum of the positive difference between the basic internal temperature and the average external temperature. Of course, the same index also exists for cooling buildings (CDD – Cooling Degree Days).
What do EU statistics say? That the need to keep houses warm has diminished over time: the value of the heating degrees days fell by 11% between 1979 (3,510 degrees day) and 2021 (3,126) at the community level. In other words, last year only 89% of the 1979 thermal requirement was required.
On the contrary, the value of the degrees days of cooling (100 degrees days) in 2021 has almost tripled compared to 1979 (37), showing an all rising trend for domestic air conditioning in recent decades.
Of course, not all European countries are the same, and the degrees per day vary considerably between the Member States. For example, between 1979 and 2021, Finland recorded the highest annual average value of degree days of warming (5,665), in contrast to the lowest observed in Malta (534).
This means that for a given building the heating requirement was ten times higher in Finland than in Malta for the period in question. Finland was closely followed by Sweden (5,325), ahead of Estonia (4,343) and Latvia (4,160).
In addition to Malta, the Member States with the lowest figures were Cyprus (780) and Portugal (1,239). In the same period, the highest degrees of cooling were observed in Cyprus (577) and Malta (574), followed by Greece (272).