Ten new air conditioners are sold every second. By 2050, the number of residential air conditioning units is projected to increase to almost 5.6 billion worldwide.
As we know global electricity consumption for cooling has reached almost 10 per cent of total energy use. In addition to cooling there are two other emerging industries that are set to accelerate global power demand and that’s robotics and AI data centres.
Regular readers of CCN are aware of my fascination with robots, specifically humanoid robots which are still in their infancy. Thankfully, this is changing with the average unit price of a humanoid robot falling 93% between 2020 and 2025. This is great news for those of us struggling to justify the high cost of buying a robot.
But alas affordability may not be our only problem. According to new research from Wood Mackenzie the global robotics industry is set to consume as much electricity as France generates from nuclear power within a decade.
The report entitled Embodied AI: How Robotics Are Accelerating Global Power Demand, warns that energy capacity planning is already under pressure from AI data centres.
Robotics are putting a largely unmodelled source of pressure on global electricity infrastructure.
Wood Mackenzie puts combined robotics power consumption at 363 TWh by 2035, with industrial robots accounting for 357 TWh in the upper range and humanoid robots adding a further 6 TWh annually.
By 2035, growth in the industrial robotic market will be approaching data centre scale.
No single country shapes this market more than China. It accounts for over 70% of annual global industrial robot installations, and Chinese companies are responsible for nearly 90% of all humanoid units currently in deployment.
The research claims power demand from humanoid robots alone could match South Korea's entire electricity generation by the end of the year.
Wood Mackenzie’s director of integrated energy research, Robert Lew, said power constraints could put a brake on robotic adoption, and that matters because labour markets in developed economies are running short of alternatives.
“Industrial robots already draw 78 TWh a year globally, and that is before humanoid robots reach any real scale,” he warned. By 2035, combined demand could hit 363 TWh. Fingers crossed we have the power to make my dreams come true.