Europe’s energy transition risks overlooking a critical gap: without treating cooling as infrastructure, buildings may lock in inequality, grid strain, and avoidable long-term costs.
Dr Orestis Angelidis, Young Energy Ambassador - European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA), Associate Energy Engineer - Buro Happold | LinkedIn profile
(Note: Opinions in the articles are of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the European Union)
Europe is increasingly comfortable talking about a just transition, resilience, and the need to decarbonise energy systems at pace. Yet in practice, we continue to plan heating, cooling and electricity as largely separate domains, often driven by project-level decisions rather than coordinated, long-term system strategies. Cooling, in particular, remains curiously absent from many of the conversations shaping Europe’s energy future. It is still treated as a private purchase, a late design addition, or a problem to be solved at the level of individual buildings.
This framing is becoming increasingly untenable.
Across much of Europe, rising temperatures, longer heatwaves and more intense urban heat island effects are already driving a rapid increase in cooling demand, with projections suggesting continued growth over the coming decades. In fact, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), energy demand for space cooling has already more than tripled since 1990 and is expected to continue rising rapidly, placing increasing pressure on electricity systems.
Cooling is shifting from a question of comfort towards one of health, productivity and liveability. In parallel, building standards aimed at reducing operational carbon are changing the way buildings respond to heat, sometimes increasing the risk of overheating when not carefully considered within a wider system. The result is a growing gap between how we design our energy systems and how people experience buildings in practice.
If Europe is serious about delivering a just and resilient energy transition, cooling can no longer remain an afterthought. It must be recognised and planned as part of essential infrastructure alongside heating and electricity, within a more integrated, system-level approach.
The language of transition is already well established; we talk about net zero, resilience, sector coupling, and a ‘just transition’ with growing confidence. From the outside, it can appear as though we understand both the direction of travel and the tools required to get there.
But from the perspective of a young professional working across projects, research and policy discussions, there is an uncomfortable gap between this narrative and what happens in practice. Nowhere is this more visible than in how we treat cooling. More broadly, it reflects a delivery model still largely shaped by fragmented, project-led decision-making, rather than a coherent vision for how energy systems should function as a whole.
Across Europe, cooling is still largely absent from the way we design and plan energy systems. It is rarely framed as essential infrastructure. Instead, it tends to appear late in the process and to be treated as an optional addition, a private upgrade, or a problem to be solved by individual buildings and their occupants.
Energy sector coupling is often presented as a key principle of the transition, expressing the need to link heating, cooling, electricity, and increasingly transport, into a coordinated system. In theory, this offers efficiency, flexibility and resilience. In practice, it is still too often delivered as a series of disconnected interventions, because the underlying decision-making remains fragmented.
Heating strategies are developed separately from electricity planning. Cooling is often omitted altogether until it becomes a compliance issue or a comfort complaint. Infrastructure decisions are still frequently driven by project-level business cases, rather than by a coherent long-term vision for how urban energy systems should function. The result is a patchwork.
Individual buildings or developments adopt technologies that make sense in isolation: air-source heat pumps, electric chillers, passive measures, or hybrid systems, typically without sufficient consideration of how these choices interact with the surrounding energy system. The aggregate impact of these decisions only becomes visible later, when electricity networks are placed under stress, retrofit becomes more complex, and system inefficiencies are locked in.
Cooling highlights this tension clearly. It sits between disciplines and between timeframes. Part of building design, part of energy strategy, part of urban infrastructure. When coordination is weak, it falls through the gaps.
Energy sector coupling, namely the integration of heating, cooling and electricity systems, offers a way out of this fragmentation. However, its value is only realised when it is treated as an overarching strategy, shaping how decisions are made across projects and over time, not as a collection of isolated projects or pilot schemes. Without this shift in perspective, sector coupling risks becoming another layer of complexity, rather than a means of creating resilient and coordinated systems.
Perhaps the most uncomfortable aspect of this fragmented approach is what it implies about access to comfort: how do we define comfort in our energy systems?
If cooling is left to be addressed at the level of individual buildings or dwellings, it is shaped by purchasing power. Those who can afford to install and operate cooling systems can secure stable indoor conditions. Those who cannot are more exposed to heat, often in the same urban environments where temperatures are highest.
For a sector that speaks frequently about equity and justice, this should give pause.
From a systems perspective, it also creates inefficiency. Individual solutions added incrementally tend to increase peak electricity demand, particularly during summer periods when cooling loads rise sharply, while reducing opportunities for optimisation, heat recovery, or load balancing. The system becomes harder to manage precisely because it is not planned as a system.
As temperatures rise, this model risks locking in both inequality and fragility.
When cooling is addressed primarily at the level of individual buildings, its system-level consequences do not disappear; they are simply displaced.
In many cases, the default response to overheating is the adoption of electrically driven cooling technologies. While these are entirely rational choices at the building scale, their cumulative impact places growing pressure on electricity networks. As cooling demand rises, it is increasingly becoming a driver of peak electricity loads during summer periods. At the same time, energy systems are evolving towards higher shares of variable renewable generation, where periods of high supply do not always align with demand. This misalignment increases the need for flexibility and storage across the system.
Figure 1: Projected growth in global space cooling energy consumption, showing sustained increases over time even under efficiency and behavioural improvements. Adapted from IEA.
As illustrated in Figure 1, global energy use for space cooling is projected to rise significantly in the coming decades, even when accounting for efficiency improvements. Crucially, this is not only a question of how much energy is consumed, but when it is required and how it is delivered. Cooling demand is expected to increasingly shape peak electricity profiles, amplifying pressure on networks.
When this demand is met through predominantly building-level, uncoordinated responses, it translates directly into grid constraints, reinforcement requirements and higher system costs. In this sense, the issue is not only the growth in cooling demand, but the way in which that demand is integrated into the wider energy system. The figure also highlights a missed opportunity: without coordinated approaches, the potential for system flexibility, thermal storage and integrated energy solutions remains largely untapped.
Yet many buildings already contain the capacity to contribute to this flexibility, whether through thermal mass, distributed storage or coordinated heating and cooling systems. Within a more integrated framework, these could help shift demand, absorb surplus renewable generation and reduce peak loads. Instead, such opportunities are often lost when decisions are taken in isolation.
The need for grid reinforcement, additional generation capacity and peak management measures therefore emerges later, often at substantial cost. Crucially, these costs are rarely borne by those making the initial design decisions. Instead, they are socialised across the wider system, ultimately reflected in energy bills or public investment.
A just transition, therefore, cannot be understood solely in terms of carbon reduction. It must also address who benefits from system improvements, who is exposed to risk, and who ultimately pays for the infrastructure required to enable change.
There is a simple but important shift that could help reframe this issue: treating cooling as infrastructure.
This does not imply a single technological pathway, nor does it mean centralisation in all cases. It is instead a question of mindset and coordination.
We already accept that certain services such as water, sanitation, transport, and heating in many contexts require coordinated planning, long-term investment and shared governance. We do not expect these systems to emerge organically from isolated decisions or purely market-driven choices.
Cooling is increasingly in the same category.
When considered as infrastructure, the focus shifts. The questions become less about what works for a single building, and more about how systems perform across a district, a city, or a region. It creates space for thinking about demand diversity, shared assets, future flexibility and long-term cost distribution.
It also makes visible something that is often implicit: that comfort is not purely a private outcome, but a collective one. In other words, it necessitates recognising thermal comfort (both heating and cooling) as a shared societal need that should be considered within a coordinated system.
Work on district heating and cooling systems provides a useful lens through which to understand the value of integrated planning. At their best, these systems are conceived not as isolated technical installations, but as part of a broader urban energy strategy. They connect multiple buildings, balance diverse demand profiles, and can integrate various heat sources and sinks over time.
Emerging approaches, including ambient and low-temperature networks, further illustrate the potential of sector coupling. By linking heating and cooling demands, they create opportunities for energy reuse, reduce peak loads, and provide flexibility to interact with the electricity system more efficiently.
What is notable is not only the technology itself, but the way these systems are planned and governed. Successful examples tend to be those where there is a clear strategic vision, coordination between stakeholders, and an understanding that energy infrastructure evolves over decades. This contrasts with more fragmented contexts, where opportunities for integration are often missed because decisions are taken too early, too narrowly, or without a shared framework.
This gap is not only visible in projects, but also in how integrated energy systems are framed at policy level. Even within widely referenced system integration frameworks, cooling is not explicitly represented as a core component (Figure 2). Its absence is telling. It reflects a broader tendency to overlook thermal comfort in summer, despite its increasing relevance to how buildings perform and how energy systems behave.
Figure 2: Towards an integrated energy system including cooling. Cooling has been added to the original European Commission framework to illustrate its potential role within an integrated energy system.
Figure 2 illustrates the European Commission’s representation of energy system integration. While it captures the interconnections between electricity, heating, fuels and end-use sectors, cooling is not explicitly included in the original framework. In the version shown here, cooling has been added to illustrate how it could be integrated within a fully connected system, alongside heating and electricity flows.
This is not simply a matter of adding another demand type. Once represented explicitly, cooling reveals additional system interactions: with electricity through increasing peak demand, with storage through opportunities for flexibility, and with district systems through the potential for shared infrastructure. Its absence from the original framing therefore highlights not only a missing component, but a missed opportunity to think more holistically about how energy systems are designed and operated.
Reframing cooling as infrastructure also sharpens the conversation around justice.
If access to cooling remains primarily determined by private purchasing power, inequalities are likely to deepen. Those most exposed to heat, often in dense urban environments, may also have the least capacity to invest in mitigation measures. At the same time, the wider system absorbs the technical and financial consequences of uncoordinated solutions.
A just transition requires greater transparency in how decisions are made and how costs are distributed. It calls for mechanisms that ensure that investments in infrastructure deliver shared benefits, rather than reinforcing existing disparities. This includes not only who pays for network upgrades, but also who has access to reliable, affordable and low-carbon thermal comfort.
By treating cooling as part of shared infrastructure, there is an opportunity to embed equity into the design of energy systems from the outset, rather than attempting to address it retrospectively.
Moving from fragmented solutions to integrated infrastructure requires coordinated action across policy, industry and academia:
Across all three, the common thread is the need to move from isolated interventions to system-level thinking, supported by coherent and shared energy strategies.
Cooling is no longer a marginal issue in Europe’s energy transition. It is central to how people experience buildings, how cities function, and how energy systems perform under changing climatic conditions.
Continuing to rely on a largely project-led, market-driven approach, where individual decisions accumulate without a coherent overarching strategy, risks embedding new forms of inequality, inefficiency and system stress into the built environment.
By contrast, recognising cooling as infrastructure and planning it alongside heating and electricity within clear, coordinated energy strategies, offers a pathway towards systems that are more resilient, more efficient and more equitable.
If Europe is serious about delivering cooling for all, it must move beyond fragmented fixes and a patchwork of disconnected solutions and instead define how energy systems should function at a collective level. Only then can thermal comfort be delivered not as a matter of individual advantage, but as a shared and reliable outcome of the energy transition.
