Back in the 1970s Gulf countries bet big on the idea that technology could make hot, arid places habitable. The gamble paid off. Abundant oil and gas fuelled construction, accelerated investment and powered round-the-clock cooling. The population of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC), a club of six petro-monarchies, grew from 6.3m in 1970 to 63m today.

That growth came at a cost. Air-conditioning units in flats and building-wide systems to keep the heat out of whole blocks gobble up power and produce emissions that accelerate warming. Today cooling accounts for as much as two-thirds of peak electricity demand in the GCC. So Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar have sought systems that would keep their cities liveable while using less power and doing less damage to the climate. As global warming makes air-conditioning necessary in ever more places, they want to export that technology to the rest of the world.

Other countries, including Singapore and America, have similar systems, but few match the scale and design for extreme conditions seen in the Gulf. Tabreed, an Emirati firm, runs the world’s largest scheme in downtown Dubai, where it cools 80 buildings, including the Burj Khalifa and Dubai Mall. The company claims that, compared with older cooling methods, it reduces annual carbon emissions by about as much as removing 40,000 cars from the roads every year. It also runs what it calls a “zero waste” district-cooling system in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, where geothermal energy powers the chillers and heat is pumped back into the ground.

District cooling requires copious water, a challenge in water-scarce regions such as the Gulf and many other places where air-conditioning demand will almost certainly grow. Gulf countries have cut freshwater usage by running the systems on treated waste water, rather than the potable sort. A plant in Saudi Arabia is using seawater. More recently, the countries have been looking to integrate cooling-hungry data centres for artificial intelligence (AI) applications into district-cooling systems. Tabreed is also experimenting with adding tiny particles to cooling water, letting it absorb more heat.

Though they are about 40% cheaper in the long term than other solutions, big-ticket systems remain expensive to build. GCC countries were rich enough for that; many other places may not be. Rich European countries could afford it, but have yet to reach political consensus on how much to invest in cooling and where to buy the tech. As extreme heat becomes more common, they will probably fork out the cash. Tabreed and other companies in the Gulf will be hoping to get a chunk of it. ■