On July 4, 2026, more than 1 million Americans lost power during a heat wave.¹ New York mayor Zohran Mamdani quickly proposed a one-size-fits-all 78^oF thermostat limit.² Paris’ deputy mayor suggested America’s near-universal air-conditioning coverage was linked to Europe’s recurring heat-adaptation problem.³ What if political rationing of cooling to residential customers decreases investment in new energy efficient technology and inadvertently increase blackout risks?

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib has introduced a bill that would require removal of AI data centers from federal property under draconian CERCLA standards devised for abandoned 1970s hazardous waste dumps – not the clean, permitted facilities through which every publisher publishes their work and every call gets routed. House bill 9939 by Tlaib would ban any data center using over 20 MW electricity from all federal properties, presumably including defense and intelligence data centers serving government agencies.⁸ This legislation is intended as a political “shot across the bow” of the technology community that enables our modern connected life.

Singapore’s founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, famously called air conditioning the most important invention of the 20th century.⁴ Before residential air conditioning, the United States suffered thousands of heat-related deaths every summer.⁵ Europe’s annual heat death toll is estimated at more than 30,000.⁶ India, with higher temperatures and year-round blackouts, loses an estimated $70 billion annually to blackouts.⁷ “Climate adaptation” should include investment in decentralized energy-efficient cooling to preserve business assets, human health, resilient electric grids and human flourishing.

Refrigeration and industrial cooling applications like data centers require far more energy than residential air conditioning targeted by the mayors.⁸ AI is the fastest-growing cooling application on the planet.⁹ Refrigeration uses more energy and underpins both health care and food security worldwide. Why do policymakers from New York to Zimbabwe tax, tariff and treat cooling as a luxury good to limit rather than as an innovation opportunity?

Far from a villain, the climate control, materials, chemicals, and tech companies have an environmental success story few people understand. Following the discovery that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) harmed the stratospheric ozone layer that protects earth from UV radiation, the industries refined multiple innovations to enable the ozone layer to recover.¹⁰ Consequently, the Montreal Protocol is a rare success among multilateral treaties.¹¹ Energy efficiency of cold chain technology has more than doubled in the US since the 1970s oil embargo, cutting the real cost of delivering fresh food, reducing GHGs associated with each refrigeration ton and making fresh food, medical care and tech affordable to more than 5 billion people.¹² Like the CFC phase-out, this macro scale energy efficiency transformation resulted from a wide array of privately generated innovations rather than a single national utility plan or NASA-style tech moonshot.

Grid risk and intermittent renewables have been hotly debated since the 24-hour 2025 blackout in renewable-heavy Spain, with opinions falling along political lines.¹³ What isn’t debated: rising peak-load conditions contribute to blackout risk that was catastrophic for many businesses. Utilities, both public and private, cannot install new generation, transmission and distribution equipment as fast as cooling load growth.¹⁴ This means lowering the electricity required to serve a utility territory’s total cooling load, measured in MWh input per MWh refrigeration output, is probably the most impactful medium-term target for enabling business continuity with stressed grids.

The Energy Star program, global energy-disclosure standards, national action plans, and voluntary pledges all try to nudge economic actors toward efficiency.¹⁵ But as we told energy-efficiency pioneer Amory Lovins, the most efficient appliances aren’t market leaders even with Rolling Stones concerts and cash rebates in California, the wealthiest U.S. state.¹⁶ Capital cost matters.

Public agencies, utilities, companies, universities, and private groups all sponsor innovation grant programs. Companies spawned in these programs have not yet managed to create a niche market large enough to impact peak load growth in a single utility or ISO. The dynamics of the small grant ecosystem may turn out to be “penny-wise but pound-foolish” with flashy partnerships but no tangible impact on grid resilience required for our electrified world.

The renewables ecosystem offers a possible institutional template for scaling cooling innovation. Powered by ~$6 trillion,¹⁷ solar and wind generation grew from 130 million megawatt-hours in 2005 to 5.5 billion megawatt-hours by 2025, a 40-fold increase representing ~15% of electricity generation.¹⁸ Notwithstanding the uptick in atmospheric CO2 concentrations from 380 ppm to 427 ppm during this period (according to NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory measurements),¹⁹ the renewable investment growth curve is proof of the capital mobilization possible when stable institutional mandates, pragmatic innovators, and specialist capital all pull in the same direction.

Can a parallel investment ecosystem be pointed toward the decentralized, cooling challenge faced by utility customers? Downstream energy efficiency benefits are amplified by the electrical losses in the grid system from generation to storage and transmission and distribution.²⁰ We view that diversity of sectoral opportunities and technologies as a market feature, presenting more opportunities for improvement to thousands of innovative companies.

What’s missing isn’t innovation. NVIDIA, a company with a market cap of $1+ trillion,²¹ is pivoting from their air-cooling heritage to liquid-cooling reference designs.²² Ecozen’s (ecozensolutions.com) solar-powered, IoT-enabled pump control and refrigeration systems reduce consumer electric demand and enable resilience in the face of stressed grids.²³ Circolife’s (circolife.com) cooling-subscription service addresses the first-cost problem that stymies sales of efficient cooling equipment in both the United States and India.²⁴

These companies exemplify two strategies that have greater potential than 4+ year old rebate programs: a thermal technology stack that reduces the kWh needed per ton of cooling, and business models that accelerate commercial deployment of top-tier energy-efficient technology.

NVIDIA may not need capital formation to scale its reference designs, but it can benefit from partnerships as heat explosion in data centers is forcing a wholesale re-design. Corporate leaders like the Beyond Alliance recognize that substantive climate progress requires leveraging their supply chain ecosystem.²⁵ Scaling innovation requires more strategic buy-in from chief sustainability officers, it will require additional capital, new specialists, and explicit adaptation targets on an economic par with the renewable-energy mandates of the last decade.

The financial upside may not be as apparent without clear tax benefits to renewable investors, but in our opinion cold chain transformation offers greater organic growth opportunities as well as an essential climate resilience opportunity. The emergence of private equity off-balance-sheet partnerships to finance center buildouts of tech leaders is a clue that scale is there.²⁶ Ecolab’s $4.75 billion acquisition of coolant-distribution leader CoolIT validates our view that companies that can deliver more cooling tons per kWh will be acquisition targets for global players looking to scale heat adaptation.²⁷

Public institutions and private equity aren’t the only stakeholders with a mandate here. Tech companies, electric utilities, AI companies, HVAC manufacturers, energy companies, food companies, health systems, and real estate investors all have a stake too. The urgency of cooling investment is compounded by the coincidence that grid failures often occur when it’s hot. The best way to adapt to a warming world isn’t for governments to ration cooling, it’s to invest using market mechanisms that deliver more of it, to more applications serving more people, generating reductions in GHG/kWh, with more cost-effective solutions. And to start now.

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Jonathan Naimon is the founder of Sustana Cooling Partners, an impact manager specializing in cold chain investment. Prior to forming Sustana, he led LGA, the first sustainable manager selected by the California State Teachers Retirement System. At LGA, he invested into Tesla at $16 and helped pioneer the third-party finance solar model that has facilitated institutional investment in renewables. Jonathan was a scientist at ABB, where he analyzed prospective targets and helped acquisitions forge partnership with the US Department of Energy. He began his career at ICF, where he led economic analysis of refrigerant alternatives to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that contributed to degradation of the stratospheric ozone layer. He has degrees in environmental management and biology from University of North Carolina and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon and the BI, the Norwegian School of Management.

Thanks to Aarushi Gupta for research for this article. Aarushi Gupta is an energy advisor with Sustana Cooling Partners.

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Footnotes

1. “More than 1 million lose power as heat, storms, and grid strain slam the Northeast and Midwest,” AccuWeather/Yahoo News, July 4, 2026; ABC News, “More than 1 million without power as US blanketed by heat wave,” July 2026. Later tallies put cumulative outages from the July 4 to 6 storm and heat event at roughly 1.3 million customers, concentrated in Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
2. Mamdani asked New Yorkers and businesses to voluntarily set thermostats to 78°F during the heat emergency, and the city applied 78°F in its own buildings: CBS New York, “NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani roasted over ’78 degrees’ suggestion”; The Hill, July 2026. A separate campaign policy proposal would require property owners to keep indoor temperatures at or below 78°F when outdoor temperatures exceed 82°F.
3. Audrey Pulvar, deputy mayor of Paris, argued that U.S. emissions and America’s “90% air-conditioned” cities bear significant responsibility for the warming behind Europe’s heat waves, and that air conditioning “contributes and aggravates the problem”: Fox News, “Paris deputy mayor blames the United States’ carbon emissions for deadly heat wave,” June 30, 2026; Moneywise, June 2026. The remarks followed criticism from visitors during the 2026 FIFA World Cup of how little cooling French buildings provide; roughly one quarter of French households have air conditioning. The heat wave that prompted the exchange killed more than 1,300 people in Europe on the World Health Organization’s initial assessment of June 28, 2026, a toll later revised to at least 12,000 excess deaths across nine countries, with mortality concentrated among older adults in Germany, France, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands (AFP analysis of national mortality data, July 2026). Europe’s low air-conditioning coverage is a documented driver of that mortality; see notes 5 and 6.
4. Lee Kuan Yew: “Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.” Originally given in response to a 1999 Wall Street Journal question and repeated in a 2009 New Perspectives Quarterly interview.
5. Alan Barreca, Karen Clay, Olivier Deschenes, Michael Greenstone and Joseph S. Shapiro, “Adapting to Climate Change: The Remarkable Decline in the US Temperature-Mortality Relationship over the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Political Economy 124, no. 1 (2016): 105–159. The mortality effect of days above 80°F fell roughly 75 to 80 percent after 1960, a decline the authors attribute essentially entirely to the diffusion of residential air conditioning.
6. Estimates vary widely by method and year. The 2026 Europe report of the Lancet Countdown estimates roughly 62,000 heat-related deaths in Europe in 2024; Nature Medicine put the summer 2022 figure above 61,000; WHO and UN estimates for 2000 to 2019 average more than 175,000 annually for the WHO European Region.
7. World Bank, In the Dark: How Much Do Power Sector Distortions Cost South Asia? (2018): India’s power sector efficiency gap, measured as societal cost across the full supply chain including blackouts, subsidies, coal misallocation and transmission and distribution losses, cost roughly 4% of GDP, or about $86 billion, in fiscal year 2016. On outages specifically, Hunt Allcott, Allan Collard-Wexler and Stephen D. O’Connell, “How Do Electricity Shortages Affect Industry? Evidence from India,” American Economic Review 106, no. 3 (2016): 587–624, estimate that India’s average level of shortages reduces the average manufacturing plant’s revenues and producer surplus by 5 to 10 percent. World Bank, Underutilized Potential: The Business Costs of Unreliable Infrastructure in Developing Countries (2019), puts Indian firms’ outage-related lost sales above $10 billion annually.
8. The IEA puts space cooling, meaning air conditioning across residential and commercial buildings, at roughly 2,000 TWh, about 10% of global electricity, and finds that space cooling accounts for only about half of total cooling energy, with industrial and commercial refrigeration accounting for the balance. Residential air conditioning is a subset of that first half, so the combined load of commercial and industrial refrigeration, cold chain and data centre cooling exceeds residential air conditioning alone. Estimates for all refrigeration, air conditioning and heat pump equipment combined range from 17% of global electricity (International Institute of Refrigeration) to 25 to 30% (UNEP briefing note, 2019). Global data centre demand alone reached roughly 485 TWh in 2025. The residential share of that total buys a large and well-documented reduction in heat mortality; see notes 5 and 6.
9. IEA, Energy and AI (2025) and Electricity 2026: global data center electricity demand reached roughly 485 TWh in 2025, up 17% year over year, with AI-specific facilities growing about 50%, and is projected to roughly double by 2030. Cooling and compute are the two most energy-intensive processes in a data center.
10. UNEP OzonAction, “About Montreal Protocol”; UN News, “Ozone layer recovery is on track, due to success of Montreal Protocol,” January 2023. Nearly 99% of controlled ozone-depleting substances have been phased out.
11. The ozone layer is projected to return to 1980 values around 2040 for most of the world, 2045 over the Arctic and 2066 over the Antarctic. NOAA also credits the Protocol with avoiding an estimated 0.5°C of warming. NOAA, “Montreal Protocol emerges as a powerful climate treaty.”
12. The Appliance Standards Awareness Project reports that a typical new refrigerator uses about 75% less energy than its 1973 counterpart while offering roughly 20% more capacity, an improvement of about fourfold that more than supports “more than doubled.” ACEEE and DOE document similar trends across cold-chain equipment.
13. The April 28, 2025 Iberian blackout cut power to Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France; supply was restored in most areas within about 10 hours, and up to roughly 20 hours in some. Spain’s government attributed the event to voltage-control failures, insufficient backup capacity and poor planning rather than a cyberattack, and adopted Royal Decree-Law 7/2025 in response.
14. NERC, 2025 Long-Term Reliability Assessment (published January 2026): summer peak demand is forecast to grow 224 GW over ten years, a 69% increase over the prior year’s forecast, with 13 of 23 assessment areas facing resource adequacy challenges as generation and transmission additions lag load growth.
15. ENERGY STAR was created by EPA in 1992 and authorized by the Energy Policy Act of 2005; it is administered jointly by EPA and DOE. See Congressional Research Service, “ENERGY STAR Program,” IF10753, updated April 23, 2026, and EPA ENERGY STAR benchmarking and disclosure policy resources.
16. Personal communication with Amory Lovins, cofounder of Rocky Mountain Institute.
17. BloombergNEF reports $4.9 trillion invested during the tripling of renewable capacity between 2010 and 2022, and record global energy transition investment of $2.3 trillion in 2025 alone. BNEF separately estimates renewables investment needs of nearly $6 trillion across 2025 to 2035. IRENA and BNEF joint work on tripling renewables by 2030 provides the comparable capacity figures.
18. Ember, Global Electricity Review 2026 and Global Electricity Mid-Year Insights 2025: solar generation reached 2,778 TWh in 2025, up 636 TWh year over year, and wind added 205 TWh, putting combined wind and solar in the range of 5,500 TWh.
19. NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory, Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. Global annual mean CO2 was about 379 ppm in 2005 and 422.8 ppm in 2024, a record; the May 2025 monthly peak at Mauna Loa was 430.5 ppm (NOAA) and 430.2 ppm (Scripps). The 427 ppm figure is consistent with a 2025 global annual mean.
20. U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates transmission and distribution losses at roughly 5% of electricity transmitted and distributed annually in the United States, with losses in India closer to 15%, meaning each unit of demand avoided at the point of use displaces more than one unit of generation.
21. NVIDIA’s market capitalization was approximately $4.8 to $5.1 trillion in mid-2026, with shares trading near $210 in June 2026.
22. NVIDIA’s DSX reference design specifies 100% liquid cooling of every chip and networking component in a closed loop with no fans; GB300 NVL72 reference designs support up to 142 kW per rack. NVIDIA estimates a 50 MW facility can save over $4 million annually in cooling energy and water costs and reduce water use from roughly 2.6 million gallons per MW per year to near zero.
23. Ecozen Solutions (Pune, India) markets Ecotron, an IoT-enabled solar pump controller with predictive analytics, and Ecofrost, a solar-powered portable cold room available for lease or purchase. Company materials at ecozensolutions.com; funding history reported by AgFunderNews. Performance claims are the company’s own and are not independently verified here.
24. Circolife offers all-inclusive air-conditioning subscription plans using IoT-enabled, self-learning equipment, positioning the model as a solution to the first-cost barrier. Company materials at circolife.com. Performance and savings claims are the company’s own and are not independently verified here.
25. The Beyond Alliance is a business-led coalition founded in 2020 whose members represent more than $2.5 trillion in annual revenue, including Amazon, Autodesk, Figma, Google, JP Morgan Chase, Salesforce and Workday. Its Superpollutant Action Initiative is a $100 million campaign targeting methane, black carbon and refrigerant gases. See beyond-alliance.org and We Mean Business Coalition.
26. See Meta’s October 2025 joint venture with funds managed by Blue Owl Capital to develop the $27 billion Hyperion data center campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Blue Owl funds hold 80% and Meta 20%, with roughly $7 billion of cash contributed and debt placed privately with PIMCO and other bond investors. Reported as the largest private-credit transaction executed to date.
27. Ecolab announced the acquisition of CoolIT Systems from funds managed by KKR for approximately $4.75 billion in cash on March 20, 2026, and closed the transaction in mid-2026. CoolIT is expected to generate roughly $550 million in sales over the following twelve months, and Ecolab expects the deal to double its high-tech market opportunity from $5 billion to $10 billion.