In a Fortune op ed, infrastructure software executive Taco Engelaar warns that Europe's push to install more air conditioners, including subsidized cooling rollouts championed by France's Marine Le Pen, risks straining the grid it is meant to relieve, after a week of record heat…
Europe's grid operators were not ready for this week. As temperatures pushed past 40°C from Madrid to the Balkans, France's power grid recorded rolling strain events, Britain's National Grid ESO issued its first summer capacity alert of the season, and national health authorities across the continent logged more than 1,000 heat-related deaths, according to figures cited in a Fortune op-ed published Monday by climate-tech executive Taco Engelaar. The political response across Europe is converging on a single answer: install more air conditioners, fast.
That answer, Engelaar argues, may be the one most likely to deepen the underlying crisis.
Engelaar, senior vice president and managing director at Neara, a firm that builds software for utilities and grid planners, has spent two summers warning that Europe's cooling gap with the United States is hardening into a structural problem. In an August 2025 Fortune column he called the gap an "economic liability." In this week's piece, headlined "Top climate tech exec: Europe is sweating through a heat crisis America solved decades ago," he escalates that language: the gap is now "an unavoidable threat." Neara, which sells resilience-planning tools to utilities and infrastructure owners, has a direct commercial interest in shaping that conversation, and the article is labeled as expert commentary, not reported news. The projections it leans on deserve to be read with that in mind.
The two figures doing the most work in the piece are both Engelaar's, not independent measurements. He writes that roughly 90% of U.S. households have air conditioning, against about 20% in parts of Europe. He projects that Europe could lose up to 7% of its annual output of goods and services over the next four years to heat-related losses if the gap stays where it is. Those numbers travel widely because they fit a one-line story, but they are the executive's own framing, not audited consensus. The Neara-hosted version of the piece makes the company's role in distributing the argument explicit.
What is not in dispute is the grid math. Adding millions of window and split-system air conditioners to a network built around winter peaks, distributed rooftop solar, and tight interconnection with neighbors does not just raise demand. It shifts that demand into the hottest hour of the hottest afternoon, when the system is already closest to its limit. European grid operators have warned for years that summer demand, once a rounding error, is now the season that breaks planning models. France's RTE and the U.K.'s National Grid ESO have both publicly flagged the trajectory in recent summer reviews.
The political reaction is arriving faster than the engineering response. France's subsidized-AC conversation has moved onto the political mainstream, with Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National tying cooling access to voter anxiety about repeated heat emergencies and parties across the spectrum moving in the same direction. The European Commission's adaptation directorate has signalled openness to cooling-equipment subsidies as part of broader heat-resilience funding. The political logic is straightforward: visible hardware delivered before the next heat dome. The grid logic is less forgiving. A subsidy that pulls forward AC purchases without coordinated demand-response programs, building thermal upgrades, or transmission reinforcement simply transfers the bottleneck from a household sweating at night to a substation tripping at 4 p.m.
Engelaar's sharper point, the one that distinguishes this year's essay from last summer's, is that the AC gap is no longer a problem you can close with hardware alone. Last year's piece framed the issue as a long-running adoption lag America had solved through post-war suburban build-out and cheap electricity. This year's piece concedes that lag and points at what comes after: even if every European household that wanted a unit could buy one tomorrow, the grid those units would sit on was not designed for sustained summer peaks at that scale. The bottleneck has moved from living rooms to substations.
That framing also explains why the cooling-subsidy conversation has quietly become a stress test for European climate policy more broadly. Subsidies work politically because they put a visible object in a household. They work less well as climate policy because the avoided-heat-death return depends on the grid holding. Neara's commercial pitch to utilities is essentially that a software-defined view of network risk is the missing piece, and Engelaar's op-ed travels the same thesis into a policy readership. That does not make the diagnosis wrong. It does mean the article is part of a sales conversation as well as a policy one.
The harder decisions are the ones being deferred: building retrofits that cut cooling demand before it reaches the grid, coordinated demand-response programs that pay households to let utilities nudge thermostats during peak hours, transmission reinforcement that lets surplus solar from Spain and rooftop generation from Germany flow into French demand centers during heat events, and cooling-center networks that protect the elderly and outdoor workers who cannot be served by a wall unit. Each is slower, less visible, and harder to campaign on than a subsidized AC unit, and each is closer to what the actual exposure looks like.
Whether Europe's leaders reach for those harder tools before the next heat dome will determine whether Engelaar's escalation from "liability" to "unavoidable threat" reads as prophecy or as a prompt. The grid that failed this week will be asked to carry more load next summer, with or without the planning to match.