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• An air conditioning system with thermoelectric modules is analysed and optimised. • Cooling investment and operating costs are discussed. • Heat exchangers are optimised based on economic indicators. • The economically optimised air conditioning system can be significantly overloaded. • TEC air conditioning is expensive but quiet, compact and environmentally friendly. The paper presents simulations of an air conditioning system based on thermoelectric modules. The proposed system is of a very simple structure, easy to control, scalable, noiseless, and harmless to the environment. The most important parameters that were to be changed were the number of modules, the electric current, and the size of the heat exchangers. The analyses were carried out for a commercially available thermoelectric module whose parameters were determined experimentally. The air conditioning system was analysed in terms of its cooling capacity and COP. Furthermore, it was optimized with economic criteria to achieve the highest cooling capacity of 1 dollar of total cost (electricity and investment) in a set period of device lifetime (ETCC – economic total cooling capacity). For 2400 h of device operation, at a temperature difference of 5 K and the average electricity cost in the EU, the optimized ETCC totals about 0.58 W/$. With the possibility of altering the inner geometry of the thermoelectric modules, the factor increased to 0.64 W/$. The test results showed that the device optimized in terms of ETCC did not operate with maximum cooling power and could be overloaded by about 30% in the reference working conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]