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Can we air condition our way out of extreme heat? part 1: a primer on air conditioning
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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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we can't.
air conditioning does not work with hundred percent efficiency, so you will cool your apartment, removing x joules of heat from inside and create 1,1 x joules of heat outside. your apartment is now temporarily colder, but there is more heat in total than there was before.
you will now be tempted to use the air conditioning even more, creating even more heat. welcome to hell.
Yep. That's also not counting the heat generated from the electric transmission infrastructure between the power plant and your dwelling. Plus the extra emissions from dirty power plants to power all of the A/C.
Hell indeed.
i mean if we had AC that would work with 100% efficiency, then it would be the prime use case for solar panels. you only need AC when there is a lot of sunlight and vice versa.
Technically, all heat pumps have greater than 100% efficiency. It is how electric heat pump heating can compete with natural gas heating in terms of efficiency.
They have a greater than 100% Coefficient of Performance, which is often marketed as efficiency in heat pumps. Their efficiency is bounded between 0 and 1 like every other physical system.
I don't think we'll ever make any machine that's 100% efficient (electric resistance space heaters aside), but maximizing the efficiencies we can will at least mitigate most of the problems if they're powered by clean energy.
Not sure if ground source heat pumps (which would heat the ground rather than the air in the summer in AC mode) would make a meaningful difference or not.
I worry that this will just displace the problem for a generation, and eventually, just as the atlantic ocean has warmed to fucking jacuzzi levels, eventually we won't be able to pour more heat into the ground.
https://apnews.com/article/record-hot-water-florida-coral-climate-change-6414d44c6f120507d3ee37c059fb75cd
i didn't mean to imply that, it was purely theoretical remark
Yea, I got that :) just building on it.
but the rich will. they won't hesitate even if they know it's making things worse for everyone.
watch.