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.
Plus the extra emissions from dirty power plants to power all of the A/C
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 don’t think we’ll ever make any machine that’s 100% efficient
i didn’t mean to imply that, it was purely theoretical remark
Yea, I got that :) just building on it.
This was a great, succinct article. Here are a few key points that I noticed:
The important result here is that the efficiency of your air conditioner decreases as ∆T increases — e.g., as the outside temperature goes up.
the work required to keep your house at a fixed temperature Tc increases with the square of the temperature difference between inside and outside temperature, ΔT².
Let’s use the same numbers from the previous example: you want to keep your house at 75F. If climate change has increased the outside temperature from 96F to 100F, the energy your air conditioner consumes increases by (100-75)2/(96-75)2 = 252/212 — this is an increase in energy consumption of 42%!
Averaged over an entire day, the increase will be less than this because ∆T is smaller for much of the day (e.g., at night) But the result is robust: climate change is driving exponentially increasing energy demand for cooling.
People with financial means, who work in air-conditioned offices and live in climate-controlled homes, can handle rising temperatures by simply paying for more electricity.
However, a significant portion of the global population lives the hot life. These people live in homes without air conditioning, work outdoors or in warehouses or kitchens with no climate control.
