The rise of air conditioning – and push to improve it

You're listening to the IEA's podcast, Everything Energy.

I'm your host, Dan Hewitt.

This is the third episode of our mini-series on energy innovation.

We've been looking at some of the ideas and inventions that have transformed our energy systems and as a result, the world we live in.

And in this episode, we're looking at air conditioning.

If I asked you to think about the technologies that have shaped our modern world, you might say the internet or maybe the internal combustion engine.

But there's a reason some people think it's this.

Air conditioners really shaped where and how we live.

Air conditioning determines our health.

Air conditioning determines our productivity.

It has really transformed life dramatically.

To explain why, we're going to have to start back in 1902 in Brooklyn with a printing company that had a problem.

And that was the heat.

Humidity was making the paper Ed Sackett and Wilhelm's lithography and printing company expand or wrinkle.

And that ruined their prints.

So they turned to a young engineer called Willis Carrier.

He had an invention he called Apparatus for Treating Air.

The idea was to circulate air over copper coils chilled by ammonia, which absorbed heat and cooled the air.

The result? No more humidity.

Here's the IEA's Chiara Del Mastro, an energy analyst focused on buildings, to explain how it works.