Rising heat will push India’s electricity use higher by 2050 — but the country’s poorest households will still lack the power to stay cool, according to a new report from the Climate Impact Lab (CIL).
The report projects that climate-driven heat will cause roughly 430,000 additional deaths worldwide each year by 2050. Poor countries will bear ten times the death toll of wealthy ones. The reason: money buys air conditioning, and the poor can’t afford it.
“Air conditioning is a life saver, and climate change will no doubt lead to more AC adoption in today’s wealthy countries,” said Michael Greenstone, co-founder of the Climate Impact Lab and an economics professor at the University of Chicago. “Our research finds, however, that in too many countries around the world people will not be able to respond in the same way.”
India’s Widening Divide
India sits in the middle of this story, not at its extreme. The CIL report projects India’s electricity consumption will rise about 12% by 2050 compared with today, among the largest relative increases in Asia. But that national average hides a stark class divide.
Only about 8% of India’s 300 million households currently own an air conditioner, and rural ownership sits near 1%, according to CLASP, an energy-efficiency research group. The wealthiest tenth of households own most of the units that exist.
That imbalance already shows up on the grid. India’s power demand hit a record 270 gigawatts on May 21, 2026, driven largely by air conditioners, according to Carbon Brief. Cooling now accounts for 40% to 60% of peak summer load in large Indian cities.
“With over 99% of households using electricity as their primary source of energy, up from 80% in 2011-12, we have achieved near-universal electrification,” Karthik Ganesan, a fellow and director at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, told Business Standard. Electrification, though, is not the same as affordable cooling. Power connections reach nearly every home; air conditioners still don’t.
The Mortality-Cooling Trap
The CIL report names 18 countries caught in what it calls the “Mortality-Cooling Trap,” where high heat deaths coincide with almost no growth in electricity use. Four of India’s neighbors — Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar — appear on that list. More than 676 million people live in trapped regions worldwide, and the report projects about 377,000 annual deaths there by 2050.
India itself avoids the trap at a national level because its economy and grid are growing faster than its poorest neighbors’. But the same income gap that separates India from Niger or Chad repeats itself inside India, between a Gurugram household buying a second AC and a construction worker who has none.
“We’ve identified the places most at risk of seeing more people die from the heat and least able to power up ACs to save them,” said Ashwin Rode, a Climate Impact Lab fellow and director of scientific research at the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute. “Communities will need to find ways to protect people from heat like improved energy access, employing heat early warning systems and action plans, expanded healthcare access, and targeted social programs.”
Grid Strain, Uneven Relief
India’s grid is already straining to keep up. About 1.3 million distribution transformers fail every year, largely from overloading during heat waves, according to Scroll.in. When the grid buckles, low-income neighborhoods lose power first, even though they use the least electricity to begin with.
The government’s India Cooling Action Plan projects residential AC ownership will jump five-fold by 2038, from 8% to 40% of households. That growth could ease the mortality gap CIL describes — if the next wave of buyers extends past the households that already have power to spare.
For now, the report’s finding holds in India as much as anywhere: heat doesn’t kill evenly, and neither does the power grid built to fight it.
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