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Europe Is Getting Hotter. But What If You Can’t Install an Air Conditioner?

Release Time: 2026-09-08

Europe is facing a new contradiction.

Summer temperatures are rising, heatwaves are becoming more frequent, and the demand for indoor cooling is increasing. At the same time, Europe is tightening environmental requirements for cooling and air-conditioning equipment.

People need more cooling.

But traditional air-conditioning systems are becoming more complicated to deploy.

This raises an interesting question:

Can thermoelectric cooling technology provide a new way to stay cool—without conventional refrigerants, bulky outdoor compressors, or permanent changes to historic buildings?

The answer may be yes, but not by simply replacing a conventional air conditioner with a giant TEC module.

The real opportunity is something different.

Europe Needs Cooling More Than Ever

According to the European Environment Agency, Europe is warming at more than twice the global average, while extreme heatwaves are becoming increasingly frequent. At the same time, the demand for cooling buildings is rising rapidly. The EEA is calling for more sustainable cooling strategies that combine energy efficiency, passive cooling and active cooling technologies.

This creates a fundamental challenge.

Many European homes were designed for a climate in which summer cooling was not a major requirement.

In parts of Southern Europe, air conditioning has already become increasingly common. But the problem is spreading northward as well.

An apartment in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal or another European country may suddenly face several days—or even weeks—of uncomfortable indoor temperatures.

Opening a window is not always enough.

Fans only move air.

Passive cooling can reduce heat gain, but cannot always remove the heat that has already accumulated inside a room.

For many people, active cooling is becoming a necessity.

But Traditional Air Conditioning Is Not Always Easy to Install

A conventional split air conditioner normally requires an indoor unit, an outdoor unit, refrigerant piping and installation work.

In a modern apartment building, this may be relatively straightforward.

In a historic building, however, the situation can be very different.

Europe has an enormous stock of historic and protected buildings, where renovation solutions must respect cultural and architectural value. The European Commission specifically notes that protected buildings can require tailored solutions and that some energy-efficiency measures allow flexibility where changes could disrupt heritage or where suitable low-impact solutions are unavailable.

That means an apparently simple question—

“Why don’t you just install an air conditioner?”

—is not always a simple question.

There may be restrictions concerning façades, external equipment, visual appearance, building regulations, landlords, conservation requirements or installation permissions.

For someone living in a historic apartment in a European city, the problem can become:

Too hot to live comfortably, but difficult to install conventional air conditioning.

Refrigerants Are Another Part of the Equation

There is also an environmental issue.

The European Union’s revised F-gas Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2024/573, entered into force on 11 March 2024 and introduced a more stringent phase-down of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), with the EU aiming to progressively prohibit their use in most products and equipment by 2050, with limited sector-specific exceptions.

The regulation already contains specific restrictions on certain air-conditioning equipment.

For example, for single-split systems with less than 3 kg of F-gases, equipment using refrigerants with a GWP of 750 or more is prohibited for new placement on the market from 1 January 2025. Further restrictions apply in subsequent years to various categories of split and self-contained systems.

This does not mean that Europe is “banning air conditioners.”

That would be an inaccurate conclusion.

Rather, Europe is pushing the cooling industry toward lower-GWP and non-fluorinated refrigerants and more sustainable technologies. The European Commission itself lists alternatives such as R-290, CO₂ and other low-GWP solutions.

But this transition also highlights an important opportunity:

What happens when cooling does not require a refrigerant at all?

This Is Where TEC Becomes Interesting

Thermoelectric cooling, or TEC, works according to the Peltier effect.

Instead of compressing and expanding a refrigerant, a TEC module uses semiconductor materials to transfer heat from one side of the device to the other when electrical current is applied.

There is no compressor.

No refrigerant circuit.

No refrigerant piping.

No outdoor condenser unit.

And the cooling system can be made extremely compact.

This makes TEC fundamentally different from traditional vapor-compression air conditioning.

But the more important question is:

Can TEC actually cool a room?

The answer requires some engineering nuance.

For a conventional whole-room air conditioner, the required cooling capacity can be hundreds or thousands of watts. A single small TEC module is not designed to compete directly with a conventional split air conditioner at that scale.

Trying to replace a 2–3 kW household air conditioner with a handful of small TEC modules would not be a practical approach.

But that is not where TEC has to compete.

The real opportunity is localized cooling, distributed cooling and application-specific cooling.

From “Cooling the Room” to “Cooling the Person”

Think about the problem differently.

A room may have a volume of 50, 100 or even 200 cubic meters.

But a human body occupies only a tiny fraction of that space.

Do we always need to cool the entire room?

Not necessarily.

What if cooling technology could deliver thermal comfort directly to the person?

This is where TEC becomes much more interesting.

A thermoelectric system can potentially be integrated into:

Personal cooling systems
Wearable cooling vests, jackets and smart clothing can deliver cooling directly to the body.

Localized cooling systems
Instead of cooling an entire building, thermal comfort can be concentrated around a workstation, bed, chair or sleeping area.

Bedside and sleep cooling
TEC-based systems can target the micro-environment around the user rather than the entire room.

Portable cooling devices
Compact thermoelectric systems can provide cooling without a traditional compressor-and-refrigerant architecture.

Small enclosed spaces
TEC is particularly attractive for cabinets, containers, medical equipment, electronics enclosures and other localized thermal-management applications.

This changes the question from:

“Can TEC replace my 3 kW air conditioner?”

to:

“Can TEC reduce how much conventional air conditioning I actually need?”

That is a much more interesting engineering question.

A New Concept: Personal Air Conditioning

Imagine a European apartment located inside a historic city center.

The building façade cannot easily be modified.

Installing an outdoor compressor is difficult.

Summer temperatures reach uncomfortable levels.

Instead of attempting to cool the entire building using a conventional system, imagine a compact thermoelectric cooling platform integrated into furniture, a bed, chair, wearable device or localized ventilation system.

The TEC system removes heat from the target area.

The hot side transfers that heat into another thermal pathway.

The user experiences localized cooling without necessarily requiring a conventional refrigerant circuit.

This concept could be called:

Personal Thermal Management

Localized Air Conditioning

It is not necessarily a replacement for traditional HVAC.

It is a different architecture of cooling.

TEC Has Another Important Advantage: Compactness

Traditional refrigeration systems require multiple components:

compressor, condenser, evaporator, expansion device, refrigerant lines, controls and supporting structures.

A thermoelectric system can be much more compact.

A TEC module itself can be only a few millimeters or centimeters in size.

This opens the door to cooling systems that are integrated rather than installed.

Instead of putting an air conditioner on a building, thermal management can increasingly be built into the product, furniture, wearable device or living environment.

This is especially interesting for:

Historic buildings

Apartments with installation restrictions

Rental properties

Small rooms

Bedrooms

Workstations

Personal cooling

Portable systems

Medical and rehabilitation equipment

Electronics and smart devices

But There Is One Major Challenge

TEC technology is not magic.

The biggest challenge is efficiency and heat rejection.

A TEC module consumes electrical power while transferring heat.

That means the hot side must efficiently dissipate:

the heat removed from the cold side + the electrical power supplied to the TEC.

For this reason, thermal design is critical.

A successful TEC cooling product is not simply:

TEC + fan

It is a complete thermal system involving:

TEC module + cold-side heat exchanger + hot-side heat exchanger + airflow + thermal interface + control electronics + system-level heat management.

This is where advanced engineering becomes essential.

The Future May Not Be “TEC Instead of Air Conditioning”

The more realistic future may be:

Air Conditioning + TEC

Traditional HVAC can handle large thermal loads.

TEC can handle localized thermal loads.

One system cools the building.

The other cools the person.

One removes heat from a large space.

The other provides precise thermal comfort exactly where it is needed.

This could potentially reduce unnecessary cooling loads and provide additional options where conventional HVAC installation is difficult.

A Different Cooling Architecture for Europe

Europe’s cooling challenge is not simply a question of producing colder air.

It is becoming a question of:

How can we provide thermal comfort while reducing environmental impact, minimizing installation constraints and adapting to existing buildings?

There will probably not be one technology that solves every cooling problem.

Conventional refrigeration will remain extremely important for large cooling loads.

But thermoelectric technology can occupy a different and increasingly valuable space.

A space where cooling needs to be:

compact

precise

localized

modular

quiet

refrigerant-free

easy to integrate

and potentially compatible with applications where conventional outdoor units are difficult to install.

The Real Opportunity for TEC

The future of cooling may not be about replacing every air conditioner.

It may be about changing what we choose to cool.

Instead of cooling an entire 100 m² apartment just to keep one person comfortable, we can begin thinking about thermal comfort at a much more localized level.

Instead of attaching another large machine to an old building, we can explore compact thermal-management technologies integrated into the user’s environment.

Instead of relying exclusively on conventional refrigeration architectures, we can combine different cooling technologies according to the thermal load.

This is where TEC can become more than a semiconductor device.

It can become part of a new generation of personal, localized and intelligent cooling systems.

As Europe becomes hotter and environmental requirements become stricter, the question is no longer simply:

“How powerful should the next air conditioner be?”

The better question may be:

“Do we really need to air-condition everything?”

And that is a question thermoelectric technology is uniquely positioned to explore.

CXTECH — Rethinking Cooling with Thermoelectric Technology

At CXTECH, we focus on thermoelectric technology from Bi₂Te₃ materials and thermoelectric semiconductor materials to TEC modules and customized thermal solutions.

By combining thermoelectric materials, module design and system-level thermal engineering, we are exploring applications beyond conventional cooling—from electronics and optical communication to wearable devices, localized thermal management and next-generation cooling systems.