"The Cost of Cool". Air conditioning has changed the world.

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jkirkebo said:
Yeah, like energy wells. ... So for warm summer days & nights I might use 2-2,5kWh per day for cooling :)
Brilliant! Just for comparison, my 3 year old energy star refrigerator uses 1kWh per day.

Tell us please - how is your home built and insulated? We can compare methods across the Pond. Fear not - it'll be useful for some here and likely bring you a good laugh. ;)
 
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIaz61zpLfs[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4ohXTnIxzA[/youtube]
 
I'm trying to decide if this is a statement of optimism, or pessimism...

World set to use more energy for cooling than heating
The world faces a looming and potentially calamitous “cold crunch”, with demand for air conditioning and refrigeration growing so fast that it threatens to smash pledges and targets for global warming.

Worldwide power consumption for air conditioning alone is forecast to surge 33-fold by 2100 as developing world incomes rise and urbanisation advances. Already, the US uses as much electricity to keep buildings cool as the whole of Africa uses on everything; China and India are fast catching up. By mid-century people will use more energy for cooling than heating...
As the planet heats up, more and more regions will only be habitable with artificial cooling life support systems.

Probably starting with where much of the energy we use to power AC comes from:

Extreme heatwaves could push Gulf climate beyond human endurance, study shows

The Gulf in the Middle East, the heartland of the global oil industry, will suffer heatwaves beyond the limit of human survival if climate change is unchecked, according to a new scientific study.

The extreme heatwaves will affect Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha and coastal cities in Iran as well as posing a deadly threat to millions of Hajj pilgrims in Saudi Arabia, when the religious festival falls in the summer. The study shows the extreme heatwaves, more intense than anything ever experienced on Earth, would kick in after 2070 and that the hottest days of today would by then be a near-daily occurrence...

At WBTs above 35C, the high heat and humidity make it physically impossible for even the fittest human body to cool itself by sweating, with fatal consequences after six hours. For less fit people, the fatal WBT is below 35C. A WBT temperature of 35C – the combination of 46C heat and 50% humidity – was almost reached in Bandar Mahshahr in Iran in July 2015.

The scientists used standard climate computer models to show that the fatal WBT extremes would occur every decade or two after 2070 along most of the Gulf coast, if global warming is not curbed. Using the normal measure of temperature, the study shows 45C would become the usual summer maximum in Gulf cities, with 60C being seen in places like Kuwait City in some years...

The Gulf is vulnerable to very high WBT because regional weather patterns mean it has clear summer skies, allowing the sun to strongly warm the waters of the Gulf, which are shallow and therefore heat up more than deeper oceans. This heating of the sea also produces high humidity, meaning cities near the coast are most affected...
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/26/extreme-heatwaves-could-push-gulf-climate-beyond-human-endurance-study-shows
 
Along the same lines as jkirkebo we have a horizontal geothermal field. I had the system plumbed to avoid the heat pump so in summer I can run an 80w circulation pump and furnace fan to cool our house, about 150w total. Our field slowly rises all summer until we stop needing cooling, the highest incoming water temp was 61F (hit 58F this season) at the point the house usually needs less cooling. Then in winter we start to suck that heat back out until spring where we hit a low of about 35F incoming. Our HVAC guy thought I was nuts and yes it does require manually flipping some valves, but once it is set for the season it is all automatic, the thermostat in each of the 3 zones can call for cooling which simply starts the circulation pump instead of a compressor. On really hot days or days we have a party with lots of guest's (read BTU's) I switch it back to act like a normal heat pump for cooling.

In the spring it is cool enough to dehumidify the air but by the fall it doesn't have a differential enough to dehumidify at all, but we don't live in an overly humid climate so it works for us.
 
Why every coal producer in the USA today is looking for a northwest passage to India...

One appliance could determine whether India, and the world, meet climate change targets

Raheel Shaikh had worked his way up from a $90-a-month entry-level job in digital marketing to a position that paid 10 times as much. He remodeled the two-room apartment he shares with his parents, bought a motorbike and was planning his wedding in January.

Finally, this summer, the 30-year-old Shaikh splurged on the new must-have item for the upwardly mobile Indian: an air conditioner...

"My parents lived without it all their lives, but I am earning well so I wanted to give them that comfort," Shaikh said. "For a middle-class Indian like me, it was part of my plan."

More than any other household good, the air conditioner symbolizes the soaring aspirations of one of the world's fastest growing major economies. Although only 5% of Indians own the appliances today, they are buying millions more every year, driving a worldwide boom that, according to one estimate, will nearly triple the planet's stock of air conditioners to 2.5 billion by 2050.

When Shaikh was growing up, air-conditioning was a luxury associated with five-star hotels, while ordinary Indians survived the summers by lugging pedestal fans from room to room or dabbing themselves with wet towels. As temperatures and incomes rise, the air conditioner is now what Nikit Abhyankar, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory calls "a threshold good — the moment you cross into that middle-class income level, you go and buy one."

But all that crisp air will carry mammoth challenges.

The average air conditioner sucks 20 times as much energy as a ceiling fan, and studies show that space cooling accounts for 40% to 60% of the peak energy load during the summer in hot Indian cities such as Mumbai and New Delhi. By 2030, Abhyankar projects, the explosion in air-conditioning alone will raise India's electricity demands by 150 gigawatts, the equivalent of adding three economies the size of California to its power grid.

Most of that electricity will come from coal, pumping out more of the carbon emissions that are blamed for worsening pollution, respiratory diseases, millions of premature deaths and hotter air temperatures — which will only push people to buy more air conditioners...
http://beta.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-india-air-conditioners-2017-story.html
 
whoever started this is either foolish, or a total liar. Global warming is in no way going to change our world into a movie-like dystopian furnace. So people's lives are not going to "depend" on air conditioning. If there was less air conditioning, places like Dubai, and others would just go back to the deserts they were, with small groups of Arabs in tents..

I would like to know where did they get their numbers to make those statements....

Humanity has lived all over the world for hundreds of thousands of years in all parts of the globe and air conditioning is not going to change anything
 
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