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American air conditioners running at full power, chilling the interior and dripping on the sidewalk below on a hot day always deeply trouble me. Maybe it's my e
by axelfontaine 9y ago
American air conditioners running at full power, chilling the interior and dripping on the sidewalk below on a hot day always deeply trouble me. Maybe it's my european view on things, but for contrast here in Munich we aren't just building out a city-wide heat network, but we also have a cold network! Cold river water flows through the pipe network that traverses the city and large office building can get connected to it. This way they can save massively on electricity for air conditioning by having the water do the cooling instead. And then once the water has traversed all pipes, it simply gets released back into its stream on the other end of town, just as clean as when it entered, and only slightly warmer.
- davidw 9y agoSee elsewhere regarding Americans using way too much air conditioning, but to be fair, Munich is a pretty cold place compared to much of the US in the summer. And not nearly as humid as much of the southern/eastern US.
- jriot 9y agoBerlin doesn't nearly get as hot as the United States. Try sitting inside a house in Mobile, AL in July without air conditioner and see how long you last. Using your water example, what about the deserts in the US that don't have a nearby water source to cool everything. Europe is much cooler in comparison to the US.
- tbihl 9y agoI agree with most of what you've said, but I'd also argue that having large groups living out in the desert is such an absurd configuration for humans that it presupposes an indifference for any sort of sustainability.
- rplst8 9y agoHaving large groups living in mega city heat islands is also an absurd configuration but pretty much the entire world is guilty of that one.
- muninn_ 9y agoEh, not really. Cities are better for Co2
- Nelson69 9y agoIs that established? I believe that there are major giant cities that operate with a lower CO2 footprint than suburban and rural areas might, per capita. But there is the cost of all the CO2 that allowed that urbanization; NYC didn't get the subway without a carbon cost, all that steel in the buildings released a lot of carbon, etc..
- rplst8 9y agoCO2 per capita is not the only measure of absurdity.
- gnaritas 9y agoBecause it's not absurd, the advantages of city living are too numerous to count. Your premise is flawed.
- jachee 9y ago> an indifference for any sort of sustainability. That's a pretty apt general description of Las Vegas.
- gnaritas 9y agoAnd Phoenix, and Los Angeles, and much of the southwest in general.
- dragonwriter 9y agoThe LA Basin is not a desert.
- sjg007 9y agoTechnically it is.
- dragonwriter 9y agoTechnically, it's still not; it's a dry-summer Mediterranean climate; in the Köppen system, it's a Csb, arid climates are B, Desert is BW with h/k/n in the third position depending on temperature.
- pilom 9y agoI would actually put Vegas as one of the most sustainable cities in the US out of necessity. Vegas's per capita water use is about 1/4 of the US average including all of those crazy fountains on the strip. They don't irrigate anything compared to places like Phoenix and almost all municipal water hookups use reclaimed water unlike most other cities where people have an aversion to drinking filtered piss. Vegas also gets almost all of its energy from renewable sources (hydro and a tiny amount of solar) compared to the US as a whole which is only about 10%. Colorado by comparison gets about 60% of it's electricity from coal.
- jachee 9y ago
- robohamburger 9y agoThat may be true but desert cities are still a reality. It might be possible somehow "close" these cities but that seems like something that is not going to happen anytime soon unless they simply become uninhabitable. So given people are going to be living here it makes sense to make things more efficient.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- coredog64 9y agoYou may find this hard to believe, but moving heat around (i.e. air conditioning) is more energy efficient than straight up heating. It is more environmentally friendly when you consider that in many cold locales in the US, heat is provided not by electricity, but by a shitload of on-site oil-fired devices.
- putsteadywere 9y agoI googled this, because I did find it hard to believe, and I think you're correct. According to the below source, for example, heating a home in Atlanta, Georgia throughout the winter months costs about twice as much as air conditioning it in the summer months. [0]: http://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/30576/Heating-or-Cooling-Which-Costs-You-More http://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/30576/Heating-or-Cooling-...
- TeMPOraL 9y ago> but I'd also argue that having large groups living out in the desert is such an absurd configuration for humans that it presupposes an indifference for any sort of sustainability They didn't give a damn when those cities were first founded. The issue wasn't probably even on the mind of anyone on the planet. Same is true about cities in seismically-active regions. It's too late to fix that. You'd have to convince millions to abandon their homes and go... somewhere else.
- sbov 9y agoThe unique problem of desert cities seems to be inappropriate landscaping. Even San Francisco ships its water in from over 100 miles away - not having enough water locally is just a problem of cities in general. The AC story is much worse in a desert city, but the heating story is much worse in cities in cold climates. There's also the benefit that I tend to need my AC when the sun is high in the sky, which aligns perfectly with solar. I live in SoCal and almost never use any heating, even in winter.
- cbau 9y agoEven Rome built aqueducts.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> I'd also argue that having large groups living out in the desert is such an absurd configuration for humans that it presupposes an indifference for any sort of sustainability. It's easier to irrigate a flat desert with fertile soil than to move the flat terrain and fertile soil closer to a water source. Food production is a fairly important component of sustainable human societies, and a major reason for the US (California particularly) having inhabited deserts and semi-arid regions.
- nostromo 9y agoBetter to put people in the desert than in places where they displace a lot of existing biodiversity (like, say, all of our coastal cities).
- astrodust 9y agoNot necessarily. These cities have a huge appetite for fresh water and can starve entire ecosystems of it.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoMost desert cities were founded before electricity, let alone air conditioning. Phoenix, Arizona was apparently founded as a farming town, and was quite sustainable at its early population. You can't stop people from moving and aggregating. Relocating hundreds of millions of people into freshly-built temperate cities is obviously impractical, not to mention more resource-intensive in the short and medium term than air conditioning their current residences. We have to develop techniques that work with the world as it is, not just pine for utopias that might have been.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoMy bedroom in Tampa, FL reaches 90F at night without air conditioning. There is no way I could live without AC here.
- kirrent 9y agoMy Australian bedroom is often that hot, if not hotter during the summer months. I have a fan. You get used to it.
- losvedir 9y ago> My bedroom in Tampa, FL reaches 90F at night without air conditioning. There is no way I could live without AC here. You obviously could live there... it would just be unpleasant. I lived a year in Singapore where temperatures were in the 80-90 range. I stayed on-campus at NUS and was lucky to have a room with A/C, but it wasn't common. The majority of students make do with big fans and windows. I remember working next to a campus Starbucks outside, marveling at how well designed it was to make students moderately comfortable without A/C. There was an enormous fan, and the area was covered and designed to facilitate air flow. After my time there I came back to the U.S. and can much more readily handle persistently hot temperatures. It's fairly unusual to expect it to be cool all the time. I also just got back from a trip to Oman where it was routinely above 90 or 100 all day long, and people there make do without A/C as well.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- illegalsmile 9y agoTurns out that the GP could adapt to sleeping in 90F temperatures as the human body is adaptable. After a few weeks you'd be used to it and it wouldn't matter. The Creek/Seminole did it in the southeast.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
- thescriptkiddie 9y agoA large part of this could be mitigated by building with passive thermal efficiency in mind. Features like extra insulation on roofs and south facing walls, large thermal masses, strategic eaves that block sunlight in the summer but let it through in the winter, whole building energy recovery ventilation systems, green roofs, underground living spaces, etc.
- WalterBright 9y agoSimply using a white coating on the roof can reduce the A/C bill by about 3%. It's so simple, I do not know why this isn't part of the building code in hot places. People may not like it for their homes, but for commercial buildings with flat roofs, it's a no-brainer.
- dpark 9y agoDon't most commercial buildings use white roofs? I've not spent a lot of time on commercial roofs, but the ones I've been on were always white.
- pilom 9y agoIn colder climates where heating is as much an expense as cooling, no. Most just put black tar up there because it is cheap. That said, when you need to pay to heat in summer and pay to cool in winter, the 3% savings in cooling doesn't help you when you also increase your heating bill in the winter by 3%.
- sjg007 9y agoIt is in Arizona. White or silver.
- WalterBright 9y agohttps://www.google.com/maps/place/Phoenix,+AZ/@33.4437866,-112.170185,2558m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x872b12ed50a179cb:0x8c69c7f8354a1bac!8m2!3d33.4483771!4d-112.0740373 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Phoenix,+AZ/@33.4437866,-1... Looks like good progress. Less penetration into the residential areas, but progress.
- wnevets 9y ago>what about the deserts in the US that don't have a nearby water source to cool everything. Maybe people shouldn't live in a desert if can't handle the heat.
- vacri 9y agoAir conditioning also changes humidity, not just temperature. I imagine few cities in Germany are particularly humid.
- selud 9y agoAnd warming up the rivers won't lead to any problems regarding their ecosystem?
- axelfontaine 9y agoNo. The vast majority of the heat is removed from the water by a processing plant before it gets reinjected into the stream. The temperature difference is negligible.
- cknight 9y agoIt seems like it would be incredibly expensive to retrofit to existing buildings compared to air conditioning, while remaining much less effective.
- sjg007 9y agoAC saves lives. I think concrete and blacktop everywhere is way worse.
- ramses0 9y agohttp://www.ugra.org/pdfs/SurfaceWaterTemp.pdf http://www.ugra.org/pdfs/SurfaceWaterTemp.pdf Random Texas river temperature ranges from 55º (winter) to 85º (summer). The world is a big place with lots of climate variety. :-)
- lucb1e 9y agoJust FYI, the symbol you're using is an "ordinal indicator" (it has a tiny line below it), e.g. 1º means "first" according to Wikipedia (I copied the symbol and put it in duckduckgo). TIL. For me, on Linux with US-international keyboard (with dead keys), the degrees symbol is on AltGr+Shift+0 (and then either a letter, like å, or space to just make the degrees symbol).
- jdmichal 9y agoMy font shows zero line. I can see a slight difference in shape, but only if I put the two symbols right next to each other.
- amatwl 9y agoHere is why air conditioning is important: it's estimated nearly 70,000 died in Europe during the 2003 heat wave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave
- rplst8 9y agoTo be fair, if you die from a heat wave - you probably weren't going to last that much longer anyway.
- jdmichal 9y agoAs someone who has lived in Florida for 30+ years and worked two summers at theme parks: Heat exhaustion is very easy to ignore until it becomes heat stroke, at which point you typically need help to seek treatment. Especially if you are not well versed in the symptoms.
- cknight 9y agoYep. The architecture is fundamentally not capable of dealing with the heat. I moved from Sydney to Germany a few years ago and 30°C has gone from being perfectly fine to abject misery, long before air conditioning comes in to the equation. In Australia we have houses built with sizeable gaps to allow the frames to warp with the heat, while also allowing air to easily flow in and out of the building. Windows are single-glazed. Exactly what you don't want in a German house, in other words. In Germany the houses are heat traps and the focus has largely been to conserve energy in winter time (and rightfully so). I've had doors here which stop closing smoothly in the summer because of the slightest warping, the gaps are so tiny. Houses are often air-tight, and the external walls are half a meter thick due to the hefty insulation. All windows are at least double-glazed, one place I've stayed was triple. New German builds using the Passivhaus specification are generally pretty good as they have constant machine-generated airflow at a set temperature, but as far as I am aware, this specification can only be built new - it's not possible (within reasonable cost) to retrofit an older house to the new specifications. For those, air conditioning seems the only reasonable option moving forward.
- grogenaut 9y ago"only slightly warmer" what does that do to the river, fish, algae, waste processing, etc. If you ran say houston with river water how many degrees would it be?
- undersuit 9y agoHouston already has large pipes running out into the ocean for other purposes. Radiators installed in deep ocean would just need to be more resilient to corrosion.
- athenot 9y agoThe dripping is from condensation. Right now in Atlanta, the dew point is 24°C. That means if I cool my house to reach that temperature, the humidity inside will be 100%… perfect for mold and terrible for everything else. Using an open water cooling mechanism would work in hot and dry climates, but then again those are the areas where water is a lot more precious and you don't want to waste it through evaporation. (In a highly humid environment, evaporative cooling does not work because the water has nowhere to go.) A heat pump is the only mechanism that works for this kind of climate. The exchange could be improved by using water or the ground to absorb the heat, but those solutions are way more expensive to install and can have environmental concerns of their own. I'm generally impressed with the energy initiatives in Germany and have been following the Passive House movement for a while, but some technologies only work for specific climates or only in one direction.
- swiley 9y agoI might be wrong but I was under the impression that heat pollution is super bad for ecosystems and is one of the ways factories tend to legally damage the environment.
- SonicSoul 9y agoit's scary walking on 5th ave and being hit with freezing air every time i walk by these huge shops that are mostly empty all day. I doubt any of them turn a profit, probably there for brand awareness. why don't we turn them into street facing displays only
- chewyland 9y agoIt was 45 in Bulgaria. Without my Daikin, I doubt I would have survived.