One twisted thing about cooling and climate change: It’s all a vicious cycle. As temperatures rise, the need for cooling technologies increases. In turn, more fossil-fuel power plants are firing up to meet that demand, turning up the temperature of the planet in the process.
“Cooling degree days” are one measure of the need for additional cooling. Basically, you take a preset baseline temperature and figure out how much the temperature exceeds it. Say the baseline (above which you’d likely need to flip on a cooling device) is 21 °C (70 °F). If the average temperature for a day is 26 °C, that’s five cooling degree days on a single day. Repeat that every day for a month, and you wind up with 150 cooling degree days.
Yeah, A/C is a power sink; I’m not arguing that. But people are increasingly in need of it for survival. No one needs AI (the biggest datacenter power suck to date).
Sure, let’s just gloss over the cost of heating - which relies heavily on fossil fuels or smog-producing fuels, or both.
Datacentre thermal management (especially for AI)isn’t even in the same ballpark as cooling for homes. One produces pretty charts for management, the other keeps people alive.
As US-centric as the article is, here’s a perspective from the EU.
I have a strong opinion on air conditioning. I hate it as I have worked in too many poortly ventilated offices with the AC as its only source of slightly less stale air. There should be laws against poorly maintained office ACs. However, I am going to need it at home, even if I do not like it. I live in a temperate climate that is getting hotter in summers. Fast. The house I live in was never intended for extremely hot weather: flat roof, lots of glass, poor insulation. I did upgrade the insulation, but the huge glass facades of my house make it a greenhouse in the summer unless I take some measures like sun blinds and whatnot. Even then, our top floor gets uncomfortably hot.
I have installed solar panels that allow me to generate more electricity than I need. However, over the years our neoliberal and current far right government has made it very unattarctive to invest in this as they allowed the commercial energy businesses to impose tariffs on the surplus of generated electricity.
So now I am seriously considering installing AC to use on hot summer days. Not only do I get my house cooler, I also won’t be charged for generating too much electricity. What I am not going to do, is keep the AC running all day though.
Fuck this government and its predecessors.
Have you added a UV filter to your glass? They can significantly limit how much the sun heats up your house.
We are actually considering replacing our windows entirely with triple layer panes and in-built UV filters. Our current windows are double-layered and ~30 years old.
Is that an issue. I thought glass did not allow uv through.
Glass blocks UVA pretty well but not UVB.
The tinting I have on my windows produces a very noticeable difference as to how much the window sill heats up. Without blocking too much visible light.
There should be laws against poorly maintained office ACs.
there are regulation about this. in decent offices they regularly check things like air flow, speed, quality of the air, temperature , etc
enforcing them is a different story
I don’t know if you’ve already heard of them or if they’re even available where you live, but if it’s the cold air that bugs you, there are water-cooled ceiling plates that work just as well as a conventional A/C. An office I used to work at had them and they were lovely. They cost quite a bit more though.
As an alternative if you just want to avoid feeding surplus energy into the grid, what about a battery of 5-20kWh? It could store more energy than the A/C uses during the day, probably costs about the same or less, and you can use that energy at night.
The thing that bothers me most about office AC, is that the air is stale due to poor maintenance. Yes there are regulations against this, but those are not being enforced because that would cost money and hurr-durr stockholders and hurr-durr employers. Home ACs are just wasteful. I live in a neighbourhood that has many many gardens that are fully paved over. In order to counter the heat, each house has several AC units. Dumb fucks.
I installed solar panels 5 years ago. Back then, a home battery was ~€9000 , so not worth it. Currently, a home battery starts at ~€1500 but with pitifully low capacity. There’s currently no real incentive to install these. You may save a bit of money, but at its current rate you would look at a 15 year ROI.
Switching to an EV would be a nice idea for surplus energy, but our anti-environment government has made it very unattractive to buy one, but now I am going off-topic so I’ll save that for another rant.
Home ACs are just wasteful.
I don’t know, ours eats 400-500W to cool the entire ground floor, which is a fraction of what the solar panels produce on a sunny day, and a fraction of the surplus energy we have no choice but to sell the utility company for a pittance.
In spring and autumn it can also heat the inside and has a COP of between 4 and 5 then, so much more efficient than a regular electric heater and probably more environmentally friendly than if the central heating would burn more oil - the circulation pump alone uses close to 400W.Of course we could live without it (people have lived in the house without an A/C before), but it’s much more agreeable like this, not to mention that it allows us to use the winter garden as an office in summer, which has a great view over the garden and allows us to keep an eye on the dogs. There are many much less sensible ways to use that energy than the A/C.
Back to the battery, some EVs can be used as battery storage (vehicle to house, vehicle to grid or vehicle to load). Maybe one of those would make it more viable to have both an EV and storage space for your harvested sun? Not mavy EVs can do it at present, but it may pay to keep an eye on new models.
I’m not sure “cooling degree days” are a good way to measure environmental impact. They neither represent the amount of heat pumped into the atmosphere (as the energy per degree depends on several factors such as mass and heat capacity of the cooled stuff) nor the amount of electricity used (as different A/C’s have wildly different degrees of efficiency) nor the amount of CO2 released (as that depends on how the electricity has been produced).
The power hunger of AI has already been mentioned, so I’m not going to repeat that point, though IMHO it’s by far the bigger issue than residential cooling.
Having said that, if you’re worried about the enviromental impact of your home, the power consumption of a reasonably efficient A/C can easily be offset by just a couple of medium-sized solar panels. Of course both the solar panels and the efficient A/C cost money that not everybody can afford to (or cares to) spend, so you’d have to take cheap and inefficient A/C’s off the market, thus effectively making chilled air a privilege that only the rich can afford. That’d probably lead to lots of heat strokes and other health problems amongst low-income families, so you’d have to weigh the environmental impact of inefficient A/C’s against another rich/poor gap.
Another feedback loop is that, thanks to thermodynamics, the heat being removed from homes and businesses is transferred into the environment, further raising temperatures.
All the energy from the sun becomes heat in the environment eventually.
Not exactly. Much of it radiates out into space. If all the sun’s energy remained in the atmosphere, climate change wouldn’t be a concern, as the Earth wouldn’t have been habitable for humans to even evolve.
The Orange R by John Clagett written back in 1978 was describing this feedback loop in its story.
In the story Nuclear radiation was poisoning the air and scrubbers all over the country were cleaning up the radiation but were using nuclear power to power them creating a huge feedback loop where more radiation was leaking and needing more scrubbers to clean it.
I won’t give away what they thought about solar power, but it’s awfully close to the same messages that certain orange people say about wind and solar power to this day.
ETA: it’s amazing that back in the '70s they thought our future would be nuclear pollution from power plants while they had polluting coal plants and now 50 plus years later we still have polluting coal plants.
It is a vicious cycle, yes, but I think it changed the world. Without A/C we would not have SOCAL, Florida, Texas, etc. or India or others.
We might not have them as you see them today, but there is building science that is centuries old that works with the environment to have architectural solutions that don’t even rely on electricity to retain heat or cool a space. There’s also the more modern passive house design. As someone born and raised in a hot climate like you mentioned, had we created a built environment like this instead of crippling ourselves to use fossil fuels and refrigerants with high global warming potential, we wouldn’t be where we are today. I agree that a/c changed the world. That change could have been a much more positive one had we taken a more practical approach!
I could do without a few of those
