In the summer of 2024, Rajasthan recorded temperatures exceeding 50°C. Delhi is right now in the middle of a heat wave. A super El Nino is expected to affect the South-West monsoon with resultant heat impacts this year. With 57 per cent of Indian districts now facing high to very high heat risk, it is no surprise that India has one of the highest demands for cooling of any nation on earth. The demand for air-conditioning is set to increase eightfold by 2037–38. All this calls for structural thinking on how we go about cooling ourselves.
A conventional response to cooling involving the installation of millions of air-conditioners, building by building, across India’s cities would be catastrophic for the climate. Air-conditioners have varying levels of efficiency, leak HFCs, and add heat back into already baking cities. The more we cool this way, the more we heat the city that needs the cooling in the first place. Perhaps it’s time to look at District Cooling Systems (DCSs) as a potential solution.
Shared utility
A DCS is, in essence, a shared air-conditioning utility. Rather than each building operating its own chillers, cooling towers, and refrigerant circuits, centralised plants produce chilled water and distribute it through insulated underground pipes to dozens or even hundreds of buildings simultaneously. Each building draws cooling from the network the way it draws electricity or piped gas as a service, metered and billed on consumption. At the building, a heat exchanger transfers the cooling from the district network to the internal air-handling system; the warmed water returns to the central plant to be re-chilled, completing a closed loop.
This technology is not new and several cities across the globe already have such systems in place. Paris has operated the Climespace network since 1991, now supplying cooling to the Louvre and major commercial districts at over 100 per cent energy efficiency, by drawing cold water from the Seine. Dubai has built the world’s largest district cooling market that serves the Burj Khalifa, Dubai Mall, and the Dubai Metro, using a public-private model that has become a template for other cities. Singapore has provided DCS in the Marina Bay business district since 2006 and it is expected to cut 19,439 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, which is the environmental equivalent of removing more than 17,000 cars from the road. DCS has matured as a technology and already serves the cooling needs of millions of people.
A well-designed DCS reduces energy consumption for cooling by 30-50 per cent compared to conventional building level air-conditioning systems. The efficiency gain comes from economies of scale: large industrial chillers operate at a coefficient of performance (COP) of 5 to 7, meaning they deliver five to seven units of cooling for every unit of electricity consumed. A standard split AC operates at a COP of 2 to 3. Some studies show energy savings approaching 60 per cent compared to standalone systems.
Power demand
While the climate case for DCS is persuasive, DCS is also expected to reduce peak power demand for cooling by 40 to 80 per cent. Even when there are conventional cooling systems, they achieve 30-40 per cent carbon reductions, rising as the electricity grid itself decarbonises over time.
India’s projected boom in planned urban developments, IT parks, global capability centres, SEZs, and greenfield smart cities offer ideal conditions for DCS integration as part of the built environment at the master planning stage. Tamil Nadu’s State Planning Commission, in its 2024 report, has identified Chennai’s OMR corridor, Coimbatore’s TIDEL Park, SIPCOT industrial estates, and new developments in Madurai and Tuticorin as priority locations for such systems. Indeed, the Tatas and Keppel have just partnered to implement a cooling-as-a-service project in Chennai.
While guidelines have been framed by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency and GIFT City has provisioned for district cooling, it however does not have the legal or regulatory framework it needs. Not even an Indian Standards (IS) classification. There are no codes, zoning provisions for the network of cooling pipes which form the backbone of the systems, master plans or environmental regulations. Maharashtra has come out with a DCS tariff, but the other States are yet to introduce such a tariff category. A legal and regulatory framework is therefore needed for what is potentially a transformative climate solution, an infrastructure investment, and a public health intervention all at once.
The writer is an advocate
Published on May 8, 2026