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Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner

economist.com

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Re: Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner

#61

Post by labadi »

clarionbell wrote: post #48
mavhc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Air-conditioners are heat pumps and everyone should be using heat pumps

Good luck convincing old building protection pressure groups about it (yes, around here these people are real and have power). Not to mention the bureau actually in charge of landmark protection (in some areas everything is a landmark).

Portable AC units are pretty universally allowed where I live in Austria. The mini split units are also allowed, but I've seen some folks get letters about these specifically.

Re: Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner

#62

Post by [deleted] »

close04 wrote: post #15

The article is all over the place. I thought the point will be about using your home as a "battery" to store what your panels produce during the day in the form of cool air. But I think the punchline is already in the first paragraph: > Yanks holidaying in Europe expect cool comfort, and grow surly on finding that many old-world buildings require them to sweat and bear it. And there's of course the ever present AI dr…

[deleted]

Re: Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner

#63

Post by DanielHB »

labadi wrote: post #18

As an American living in Austria, I find this conversation really tiring. Common arguments against AC are urban heat and CO2 emissions. Living in a city where 80% of residential electricity comes from hydropower, the emissions argument seems a bit moot. For urban heat zones, AC seems to be criticized in isolation. There's never a mention of a lack of tree canopy in vast parts of the city, or that reflective pavements…

> Living in a city where 80% of residential electricity comes from hydropower, the emissions argument seems a bit moot.

In an interconnected grid (most of europe) clean power capacity that is not used locally can be sold off to places that have less clean power capacity. This argument only works if all of europe was mostly renewable energy.

But I mean, heat-pump AC is quite efficient as long as you are not making your home frigid year-around I don't see that as a big argument. Govs would be better served by providing good heat-pump regulations and pre-approved installations for residential builds and banning those incredible ineficient portable ACs.

Re: Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner

#64

Post by jillesvangurp »

We are in a modern office in Berlin with actual AC. I always joke that air conditioned offices are a bit science fiction in Germany. Most of the year the lack of AC is fine. But the summers can be hot and humid here. And today it's pretty toasty outside.

The big picture in Germany is that it needs to rethink its energy system from the ground up and it's a bit behind on that (a few decades).

People burn gas to stay warm in the winter. That gas has to be imported at great cost. It's completely stupid at this point to perpetuate that system. Stop putting gas boilers in new buildings already. That's a decision that should have been taken years ago.

Heatpumps work great and they can cool and heat. That should be the default at this point. It's not something that requires further studies or chin stroking (a national sport here in Germany, they are world champions being indecisive). This has been studied to death already.

Even if heat pumps use gas powered electricity plants, they would take a lot less gas. Because heatpumps are that effective.

From a system level point of view, mass deploying heat pumps would be an investment that should start paying off big time within 10-15 years. People think of this as cost rather than as an investment with a positive and very substantial ROI. There's a bit of an economic crisis here and a cost of living crisis. And the government is moving deck chairs around on the titanic instead of investing their way out of this as they should have started doing ages ago.

Many private home owners make this choice already of course. But on a normal sized apartment building with 20-40 apartments, the tenants have to pay through their nose for warm water and heating. There are a few million such buildings in Germany. Many buildings don't even have thermostats in their apartments (mine doesn't, built this century!!!). No smart meters either (seriously, wtf?!).

Germany needs a giant kick in the ass when it comes to their high energy bills. They are high because they are structurally doing all the wrong things and refusing to do smart, common sense things. Lots of hand wringing, not a lot of action over this.

Re: Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner

#65

Post by ExoticPearTree »

lloeki wrote: post #34

Can't read the article (paywalled) so I'm basing myself on what I see > Green electricity means never having to say sorry for lowering the thermostat I literally just read some reports yesterday day about how AC can be a pathological solution. It's not about the energy being green or not, it's that independently of the energy source AC is a heat pump, so it pumps heat out into the air, which makes the air inside cool…

> It's not about the energy being green or not, it's that independently of the energy source AC is a heat pump, so it pumps heat out into the air, which makes the air inside cooler, but hotter outside; and for that, green or not, it needs to put in energy to do the work, which results in _even more heat_.

What? If things would have worked as you say, we would have solved global warming in no time. Just open the windows and blow the cold air out and keep the inverter inside.

Re: Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner

#66

Post by eigenspace »

invalidusernam3 wrote: post #19

Why has this become a meme? Sure aircon is nice but there are also reasons why it's not common in some parts of Europe. Here in central Prague a lot of the buildings are historic and protected, so you can't just gouge out a section of the building to install an aircon. Also it's generally only hot enough for aircon maybe 2-4 weeks a year. I'm seeing more and more American's yapping about not having aircon in Europe.…

This might be the coldest summer for the rest of your life. European summers are only going to get hotter, and more humid. Meanwhile, we have a pressing need to decarbonize our home heating solutions both for energy sovreignty and climate reasons.

Modern air-to-air heat pumps (i.e. aircon) are a pretty good solution for that. I think we're just going to have to work our way around this as a society. While many Europeans live in historic buildings that will require a lot more care, most do not, and installing aircon at least for homes with elederly people and young children provably will reduce unnecessary deaths during our now yearly heatwaves.

Re: Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner

#67

Post by druskacik »

invalidusernam3 wrote: post #19

Why has this become a meme? Sure aircon is nice but there are also reasons why it's not common in some parts of Europe. Here in central Prague a lot of the buildings are historic and protected, so you can't just gouge out a section of the building to install an aircon. Also it's generally only hot enough for aircon maybe 2-4 weeks a year. I'm seeing more and more American's yapping about not having aircon in Europe.…

I live in Prague and seeing the temperatures expected during weekend, I bought at least the portable AC. I'd say 2-4 weeks is quite a long period to justify this purchase.

Yes, historically, the AC didn't make sense in Prague, but there's no going back, the world is just going to get hotter.

Re: Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner

#68

Post by m000 »

tim-projects wrote: post #5

How about learning to love fans? Imho ac is only really needed for sleeping.

This. Having survived dozens of mediterranean village summers without A/C, I am genuinely puzzled how it came to be considered a necessity. Is it "modern" construction methods that turned buildings into heat batteries? So, it became a necessity in the cities, and then spread everywhere because we became spoiled and our collective tolerance to heat dropped?

Re: Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner

#69

Post by sgerenser »

carlosrg wrote: post #29

I don’t understand the obsession the Americans have with claiming that we hate AC. Europe is not a country. There are countries where AC is more used. Here in Spain it’s common. It’s probably less common in other, less hot countries. Besides heat, countries with a lower GDP probably have less ACs installed than richer countries. So probably France have more AC-per-capita than Moldova, my guess is that something simil…

Mississippi, despite its much lower per capita income than California, has a much higher percentage of housing units with air conditioning (93% vs 72%). AC is now so inexpensive that whether or not a house has AC is mostly about average summer temperatures not income.

Re: Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner

#70

Post by ExoticPearTree »

Kaibeezy wrote: post #59
stavros wrote: post #45

Install more renewables and more heatpumps, then we can climate-control our spaces with no guilt!

It seems like such an obvious conclusion. The article says the power demand for air conditioning, even at high levels of adoption, would be a “rounding error” within overall consumption. Why suffer?

Some people are just a glutton for punishment.
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