Spike in cooling demand — not only this summer

There was some talk about the power bill on MPR’s internal office messaging system and at the break room coffee machines.

“Did you see your bill from last month! My goodness!”

While that’s a paraphrase, we can certainly imagine the same conversation happening all around Minnesota. After all, the U.S. just had its warmest month in history, besting one from summer 2012. And the 10-day stretch from July 11-20 of this year was our second-hottest stretch during that time on record. The winner for most hot records in Minnesota goes back to 1936.

A timely report was just released by Climate Central, which is a nonpartisan and nonprofit group that we’ve worked with for years. They looked at a bunch of America’s biggest cities but, we’ll only focus on Minnesota. From Duluth to the Twin Cities, Rochester and Mankato, all four hubs saw a jump in cooling (air conditioning) demand since 1970. They make use of a weather metric called cooling degree days or CDD. I bet pretty much every farmer reading this knows exactly what we’re talking about with CDD, but frankly, it’s not something meteorologists use every day, so I have to look it back up myself!

The stat gets a little confusing, we know. A really hot day would have many cooling degree days. Maybe we need a better name, but that’s above our pay grade! Regardless, the need for air conditioning is certainly climbing. Some cabins and folks along the North Shore may not even have air conditioning, even though that might change given the plague of 100-degree readings across Northern Minnesota last month. You can find the four big city’s individual impact below. On a national scale, the United States Energy Information Administration recently released its 2026 annual outlook. From now until 2100, that administration expects a greater than 43 percent additional demand for cooling.