How Delhi islosing its Cool: Heat and rising demand for cooling and electricity consumption

September 08, 2025

The spotlight

Delhi stands at the forefront of the urban climate-energy nexus, where intensifying summer heat and humidity are increasing cooling demand and electricity consumption. The city’s summers are no longer defined by predictable seasonal curves of temperature and demand; instead, they now unfold as a volatile interaction of heatwaves, erratic rainfall, humidity, and surging dependence on mechanical cooling.

The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) explores this insidious link between ambient heat and humidity conditions and electricity consumption in Delhi. It investigates to show how the city’s energy consumption responds to temperature changes, relative humidity, and land surface heating, and quantify how that impacts electricity consumed. It further attempts to identify the threshold of thermal comfort defined through the heat index beyond which demand begins to surge sharply as cooling devices are switched on across the city. Heat and humidity stress increase active cooling demand and that has a direct bearing on electricity consumption. Electricity consumption becomes the near real-time reflection of heat stress.