Four minutes of air conditioning
Billions of people have access to far less electricity per day than is required to run an air conditioner for just one hour.
For five months of the year, temperatures in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, climb above 35 degrees Celsius. These temperatures are punishing for anyone, but particularly in poorer parts of the world where air conditioning cannot offer any relief.
Billions of people live in similar conditions without a way to cool down. Extreme heat makes it harder to sleep, learn, and work. It raises the risk of both acute and chronic illnesses, including heart disease, stroke, and kidney disease. Because the heat impacts people’s productivity, it traps people in poverty.1
In energy-poor countries, there is little electricity available to power a fan or an air conditioner.
We can see this by comparing how much electricity people use at home on a typical day with how much power an air conditioner requires.2 Let’s assume a typical single-room air conditioner uses around 1,000 watt-hours of electricity in an hour.3
In at least 45 countries, the average residential electricity use per person for an entire day is less than the electricity that is required to power an air conditioner for one hour.4 In the chart, I’ve shown how long the average person could run an air conditioner for across a selection of these countries.
In India, the daily electricity budget is sufficient for only 44 minutes of AC. In Nigeria, just 13 minutes; and in South Sudan, just 4.5
This is why most people in some of the world’s hottest countries do not use AC. The most recent data from the International Energy Agency suggests that just 5% of households in India, 6% in South Africa, and 16% in Brazil had air conditioning.6 In the world’s poorest countries, almost no one has it.
For many of them, even a basic fan is out of reach.
An electric fan uses around 50 watt-hours of electricity per hour. Let’s do the same comparison for another set of countries.
The average Nigerian could run a fan for around 4 hours (although they would have no other power to spare for lighting, phone charging, or cooking). The average in Haiti is about 2.5 hours. But in the world’s most energy-poor countries, the average person cannot switch on a fan for even just an hour.
Keeping cool is not a luxury. It allows people to sleep, work, and live free from punishing heat every day. For many, these are life-changing or even life-saving solutions. In colder countries, we wouldn’t accept people freezing in their homes. The opposite is also true: we shouldn’t accept people working and living in oppressive heat without ways to cool themselves down.
We have technologies that can do that well. If they are to become available for billions, the world needs more and cheaper power, while raising the incomes of the poorest.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Max Roser and Edouard Mathieu for editorial feedback and comments on this article.
How can the world reduce deaths from extreme heat?
The world will need to adapt to increased temperatures. What can societies do to save lives?
Access to Energy
Access to electricity and clean cooking fuels are vital for a good standard of living and good health.
Air conditioning causes around 3% of greenhouse gas emissions. How will this change in the future?
Demand is set to triple by 2050. Can it be met in an energy-efficient way?
Endnotes
Park, R. J., Goodman, J., Hurwitz, M., & Smith, J. (2020). Heat and learning. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.
Obradovich, N., Migliorini, R., Mednick, S. C., & Fowler, J. H. (2017). Nighttime temperature and human sleep loss in a changing climate. Science advances.
Minor, K., Bjerre-Nielsen, A., Jonasdottir, S. S., Lehmann, S., & Obradovich, N. (2022). Rising temperatures erode human sleep globally. One Earth.
To calculate daily residential electricity consumption per person, I’ve used electricity consumption data from the International Energy Agency (IEA). It gives an estimate of residential electricity used annually for each country. By dividing by population, we get an estimate of the average use per person (and then dividing by 365 gives us the daily value). Note that underneath this average, there can be very large inequalities, with many people having no electricity at all, and those that do, consuming much more than this average value. Without more data on the complete distribution of consumption, this still gives us some insight into the depth of energy poverty in many countries.
This varies depending on the efficiency of the AC unit and local conditions such as humidity. In very humid conditions, air conditioners are less efficient and often use more electricity. In drier climates, they likely use less. A plausible range is anywhere from 600 to over 1,600 watt-hours. In these calculations, I’ve used 1000 watt-hours everywhere for consistency.
I say “at least 45 countries” here because a number of low-income countries do not have data, and are likely to be well below the 1,000 Wh threshold.
Many people live with family or friends, so they might be able to share this electricity “budget”. But electricity is also needed for other things: lights, phone charging, a refrigerator, a television, or an oven. Even in a household with two or three people, running an AC unit for even a few hours a day would be far greater than their current electricity consumption for the day.
This latest data is for the year 2018. Rates are likely to have increased slightly since then, but probably not more than a few percentage points.
Cite this work
Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this article, please also cite the underlying data sources. This article can be cited as:
Hannah Ritchie (2026) - “Four minutes of air conditioning” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260216-000157/four-minutes-of-air-conditioning.html' [Online Resource] (archived on February 16, 2026).BibTeX citation
@article{owid-four-minutes-of-air-conditioning,
author = {Hannah Ritchie},
title = {Four minutes of air conditioning},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2026},
note = {https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260216-000157/four-minutes-of-air-conditioning.html}
}
Reuse this work freely
All visualizations, data, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.
The data produced by third parties and made available by Our World in Data is subject to the license terms from the original third-party authors. We will always indicate the original source of the data in our documentation, so you should always check the license of any such third-party data before use and redistribution.
All of our charts can be embedded in any site.