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Having short days in the winter, long days in the summer isnt a UK specific thing. As you get closer to the equator it may become less of a problem as summer ai
by benj111 7y ago
Having short days in the winter, long days in the summer isnt a UK specific thing. As you get closer to the equator it may become less of a problem as summer air con load overtakes winter heating as the dominant load, but we are talking about large swathes of the planet that will have higher heating demand that can't reasonably be covered by solar power alone.
- ZeroGravitas 7y agoIf you could put some kind of number on how much of a not-UK thing it was on a global scale, that would answer my original question. Like, apoarently air con is currently 10% of all electricity and set to grow. 10 AC units will be sold every second for the next 30 years. It seems solar plus batteries has that covered, but I'd be interested to know the ratios.
- benj111 7y agoAccording to this [1] it looks like about a third of energy used in commercial and residential buildings is for space heating. That only accounts for some 32 Pwh of 157Pwh [2] of energy use but is greater than the 21-23Pwh of total electricity generation. So judging by your figure of 10% of electricity usage that's 2Pwh (10% of 21-23Pwh) for air con v 10Pwh (third of 32Pwh) for space heating. But that energy demand is mostly based on combusting fossil fuels directly, decarbonisation would require a move to electric heating which would probably involve heatpumps, and quite a lot of insulation, so I would hope that that figure would drop quite alot in the future. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032114007151 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211... fig 3. [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption