It’s 35 degrees outside, your bedroom has quietly turned into a slow cooker, and almost nobody around you owns an air conditioner.
If you’ve moved here from somewhere warmer, your first Dutch heatwave is a rude awakening. You assumed a wealthy, modern country would have sorted out indoor cooling. You assumed wrong.
The short version is a mix of old houses, expensive electricity, a bit of climate guilt, and a national habit of opening a window and complaining.
The Netherlands is a recent convert to staying cool
Around one in five Dutch homes now has air conditioning, and the growth has been explosive.
Industry body Techniek Nederland expects between 2.4 and 2.5 million units installed across the country by the end of 2026, roughly 80% of them in homes. A decade ago, that figure was a tiny fraction of today’s.
The Dutch aren’t allergic to air conditioning. They’re just late to it. For most of living memory, a Dutch summer meant a few warm days, plenty of rain, and a national duty to sit outside the moment the sun appeared.
@dutchreview Double fisting ijsjes at the moment — how are you doing? 🍦 #hot #netherlands #hotweather #meme ♬ original sound – DutchReview
Europe was built for the opposite problem
Zoom out and the picture is starker. Only about 20% of European homes have air conditioning, compared with roughly 90% in the United States, according to International Energy Agency data.
The buildings are part of the story. Much of Europe’s housing stock is old and was designed to trap heat, not release it. A brilliant feature in February, a cruel joke in July.
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In the warmer south, people got clever instead, with thick walls, small windows and shutters kept shut during the day. But Northern Europe just didn’t get hot enough to bother.
Money and a bit of climate guilt
European electricity is expensive, partly because many countries import their energy rather than producing it cheaply at home. Running an air conditioner through a long heatwave stings the wallet.
Then there’s the guilt. Air conditioning accounts for around 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, roughly double the aviation industry, according to CBS News.
Plenty of Europeans feel uneasy cooling their homes with something that warms the planet.
The EU shares that discomfort. The bloc has committed to becoming climate neutral by 2050, and a continent-wide cooling binge would make that target much harder to hit.
The air conditioning paradox
An air conditioner doesn’t destroy heat, it moves it.
It pulls warmth out of your room and pumps it outside, so the street gets warmer even as your living room gets colder.
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Eva Stache, an architect and researcher at TU Delft, calls this a vicious circle, worst in cities where everyone’s units vent at once, as she tells RTL.
The units are also power-hungry, and often run in the evening and overnight, exactly when the electricity can’t come from solar. Stache’s blunt summary is that air conditioning is a fix for a few hours, not a few years.
Why experts would rather you didn’t buy one
Dutch climate bodies keep gently steering people away from the air conditioning aisle.
Milieu Centraal, the government-backed consumer information body, sums up the better approach as four verbs ending in eren:
- isoleren (insulate),
- ventileren (ventilate),
- zon weren (block the sun),
- and groen integreren (add greenery).
The idea is to stop the heat before it gets indoors.
External shading, or buitenzonwering (screens and shutters on the outside of the window, not curtains on the inside), keeps the sun’s rays out before they hit the glass.
Shut everything in the morning, open it in the cooler evening. It’s the same logic behind our 11 tips for beating the Dutch heat.
The most effective long-term fix is greenery, and Stache insists this isn’t sentimentality. Trees and shrubs deliver a genuinely large amount of cooling.
The catch is the versteende tuin, or paved-over garden. Research by insurer Centraal Beheer found the average Dutch garden is nearly half paved, and a patio can’t shade much of anything.
The contrarian view: is the stigma killing people?
Not everyone is sold on the shutters-and-shrubs argument.
Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry argued in a Volkskrant column that Europe is, per capita, the world’s leading region for heat deaths, and that this is largely a choice.
Roughly 61,000 Europeans died from heat in the summer of 2022, on a continent the equator does not run through.
He argues this can’t just be blamed on an ageing population, since the US and Japan have plenty of older people too, yet far lower heat-death risk.
The difference, he says, comes down to two letters. He points to research showing the risk of dying on extremely hot days in the US fell by around 75% over the 20th century, tracking the spread of air conditioning after 1960.
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It’s a deliberately provocative take, and the experts above push back hard, since the emissions and grid concerns are real.
But his core point lands: the people who die in heatwaves are overwhelmingly older, often alone, in homes that bake.
Heat claims more than 175,000 lives a year across the wider European region, according to the World Health Organization. For the most vulnerable, “open a window at night” may not be enough.
Who actually gets to stay cool
If you’re renting, you may have spotted the catch. In 2023, around one in three Dutch households couldn’t cool their homes enough on hot days, according to the Central Bureau for Statistics.
The split is stark. Among homeowners, around 18% had fixed air conditioning. Among renters and social housing tenants, it was under 5%, largely because you can’t bolt a unit to a flat you don’t own.
So the divide isn’t just Europe versus America. It’s increasingly owners versus renters.
If your rental leaves you sweltering, several Dutch cities now open free public cooling spots, or koelteplekken, when a national heat plan kicks in.
So is the Netherlands finally warming to air conditioning?
Slowly, yes. The smarter long-term fix probably isn’t a unit in every bedroom, though.
Heat pumps cool in summer and heat in winter far more efficiently, and the unglamorous classics still work: shutters, insulation, reflective roofs and more trees.
It helps that the heat is no longer occasional. The Netherlands just recorded its first-ever national code red for extreme heat, something that didn’t happen even in the record summer of 2019.
For now, the Dutch approach stays a charming blend of stubbornness and ventilation. Curtains shut, windows open at night, and a fan doing its valiant best.
Are you Team Airco or Team Shutters-and-Stubbornness? Tell us how you’re keeping your home liveable this summer in the comments.
