I learned a lot of things about air conditioning that didn't make it into my recent Foreign Policy piece. I've put them into this Substack post.
These factoids include….https://t.co/bEvsGMEacp
— Faine Greenwood (@faineg) January 27, 2022
Been hanging on to this since January, waiting for the right time. From Greenwood’s excellent Foreign Policy article, “Climate Change Demands More Air Conditioning“:
… [M]uch of the United States and Europe views air conditioning as a luxury, not a necessity.
In this worldview, heating saves lives, while cooling merely keeps people comfortable. Our failure to take extremely hot temperatures seriously is now on a direct collision course with accelerating climate change and ever more frequent deadly heat waves in places that were historically far cooler. And it’s mixed with a preachy, puritanical attitude toward personal decisions that sees air conditioning as an unnecessary luxury that contributes to the disaster, not as a necessity for surviving it…
… At least 600 people die each year in the United States from extreme heat events: That’s more deaths than from storms, floods, and lightning combined, according to climate researcher Kelly Sanders. That figure is probably a major underestimate, because the U.S. medical system still struggles to attribute deaths to heat or track how many such deaths take place. Heat injuries and deaths also cost money. A 2012 case study covering data from 11 U.S. states in found that the costs from heat-related injuries and deaths totaled over $10 billion. These costs are expected to rise as the country heats up…
Many people assume that air conditioning is worse for the environment than heating is. After all, why do we hear about it so much more? The truth is that heating a home uses considerably more energy than cooling one does. A 2020 study found that homes located in the coldest parts of the United States used considerably more energy and largely emitted more greenhouse gases than those in the warmest parts of the country did. A 2013 study concluded that living in colder climates in the United States demands more overall energy than living in warmer climates does: Climate control in Minneapolis uses about three and a half times more energy than it does in Miami…
How can we protect people from heat while protecting the planet? Perhaps the first step is acknowledging that the existence of air conditioning isn’t the problem: It’s that we use it and distribute it so unequally, with gigantic luxury office buildings and fancy condos using far too much of it, while sweltering, old apartment buildings populated by the poor often go without. In this light, we should pass laws that ensure that people who need access to air conditioning are able to access it and are (equally importantly) able to pay for it. These laws will also need to be written in such a way that ensures the cost of air conditioning isn’t simply passed on from landlord to tenant. On the flip side, we should examine regulatory means of discouraging big-time air conditioner users from using excessive amounts of energy to keep their buildings jacket-weather chilly during the height of summer…
(Her Substack post is very good, too!)
I’m no fan of bitcoin miners, but if the stability of your power grid depends on the benevolence of a handful of your customers, that’s not just a policy failure—it’s policy malpractice. https://t.co/y7eJhbTxR3
— Jort-Michel Connard ?? (@torriangray) July 11, 2022
Texas's power grid operator held off from imposing rolling blackouts, using voluntary cutbacks and appeals to conserve energy as scorching triple-digit temperatures hit much of the state https://t.co/Z47ZvrYujP pic.twitter.com/w5YLXMvEfS
— Reuters (@Reuters) July 12, 2022
… At the helm of ERCOT’s operations is Brad Jones, the nonprofit grid manager’s interim CEO who was appointed after his predecessor was ousted amid the fallout of the February 2021 freeze. Jones, who previously oversaw New York’s grid operator for about three years, sat down with the Houston Chronicle on Tuesday to talk about changes made since the freeze, how the grid is faring this summer and his hopes — and concerns — about the future of power in Texas.
Here are five key takeaways from the Chronicle’s interview with Jones…
2.) Jones is concerned, but hopeful, about getting through the rest of this summer
To keep up with record-breaking demand this summer, ERCOT has called on thermal generators (think natural gas, coal and nuclear) to run as much as possible, including having some humming in the background just in case their power is needed in tight grid conditions…3.) Conservation alerts no longer mean the grid is in emergency conditions
Jones said ERCOT officials used to wait until the grid was already in emergency conditions — and sometimes close to triggering rolling blackouts — before calling a conservation notice. He said that’s no longer the case, and that the conservation notices are now called to avoid getting close to emergency conditions altogether…5.) The key to long-term reliability is bringing more responsive generation online
Jones said the grid is in pretty dire need of more generation that can turn on quickly to respond to grid conditions. One option is utility scale batteries, which can store energy from wind and solar farms and discharge that stored power when their output is low. Another is fast-responding gas plants.Generators, however, have been reluctant to build new generation while the Public Utility Commission studies a new design for ERCOT’s power market. Final blueprints of the market redesign aren’t expected until later this year or perhaps early next year…
Houston resident:
dmsilev
Texas is just hewing to an originalist interpretation of the Constitution; the Bill of Rights nowhere mentions anything about electricity.
cain
Ha! Frankly, I’m glad that their state has their own grid – especially if there are greedy bitcoin operators that are just sucking up all the electricity. Force them to adjust.
While I feel bad for Texans who are suffering this – and I hope none die – but this is what happens when you have an independent grid but also incompetent party in charge.
Abbott should rightfully be condemned. Hopefully Texans will get off their ass and kick these people to the curb. Once, we get Texas the EC is ours.
Jerzy Russian
@dmsilev:
For that matter, there is no mention of Texas in the Bill of Rights.
Halteclere
Typical problem in Texas cities, and probably any hot region city – the office A/C is set low that many women have space heaters running under their desks for warmth! No telling how much electricity would be saved if the building thermostats were increased a degree or two.
(My wife confirmed that 3 of the 4 women in her department have their space heaters going at this moment.)
Added: As a man it isn’t uncommon for me to feel cold when at the office, dining out, etc. But not to the extent that I need to bring a heater or jacket to feel comfortable when inside in the middle of the summer.
Ken
@Jerzy Russian: Shhh, don’t give the Federalist Society any more bright ideas.
Sister Golden Bear
It’s not just a nation abortion bans that Republicans are planning, they’ve started efforts to use federal law to eradicate trans people from public life nationwide.
Thankfully there’s no chance of them passing now, but it’s how fascism is designed to be relentless to wear you down.
Roger Moore
The point about heat in the winter being seen as essential but cooling in the summer is a luxury is essential. I live in Southern California, and I spent way too many years acting as if going without AC was proof of my toughness. It wasn’t until I got a pet that I decided to give up on that nonsense, and I just don’t see why I was willing to act that way.
Mart
Morning of the winter freeze TX ex buddy (thanks TFG) texted parroting Abbott and Fox stating the damn windmills did it. I worked a bit in the industry and said they have winter freeze packages that they pay for up north, but are too cheap to pay for in TX – as deep freezes in Houston only happen once every fifty years. They don’t freeze protect their standard gas and oil fired boilers to save money either, and of course that was the real problem. Lot of times they don’t even put the boilers in buildings. Of course the BBB bill is given TX utilities $$ to freeze protect. “Rapid response gas plants” referred above consist of banks of jet engines spinning power generators. Three or so of these can be the equivalent of a mid-sized coal plant. They cost a lot of money and sit idle nearly all the time. They have plenty of them around my parts for peak demand, but why pay for mostly idle generators in the Great State of Texas?
VOR
@cain: IIRC, they positioned the bitcoin operators as a way to create stability in the Texas grid. I couldn’t follow the logic.
Paul in KY
@dmsilev: I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re exactly right. The Articles of Confederation don’t mention it either.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Why hasn’t Biden issued an edict banning Bitcoin?
Flying in to Denver a couple weeks ago, as the 95 degree temperature made some nasty turbulence, I was looking down at all the empty parking lots and un-solar-paneled roofs absorbing all that brutal sunlight to no purpose, thinking not for the first time that if I ever win the lottery, I’m gonna spend half of it giving away solar panels.
The nice thing about my lottery dreams is I figure not buying any tickets doesn’t materially diminish my chances of winning
Paul in KY
@Jerzy Russian: That Dan guy could write a thriller about that!
The real documents are hidden below The Alamo or in Santa Anna’s grave.
trollhattan
I follow an Austin photographer blogger who reports the heat index was 109 before noon today. Fucking hell, and I mean literally.
ETA CAISO reports 45.6% of CA’s electricity supply is from renewables ATM. We’re swinging into a hot spell and wind generation necessarily drops as a fraction of that, as wind=cooler conditions and vice versa.
More solar farms, faster. Thanks.
Paul in KY
@Halteclere: Sometimes, the AC is for the machinery. Not for people. That’s the way it was in my Comm Center down in Homestead.
Roger Moore
@Halteclere:
This is a real issue. I can understand why you might need to keep the AC down low if there’s a legitimate reason for people to wear heavy clothes. For example, welders need to completely cover themselves to protect against weld spatter, and it makes sense to keep their environment cool enough their protective gear isn’t causing them heat problems. But we need to do away with the idea that business people in hot climates need to wear clothes originally designed for Victorian London. For that matter we need to stop demanding women and men wear clothes intended for completely different climates, making it impossible to keep anything at a temperature that satisfies everyone. Just let people wear clothes that are appropriate for their local conditions, and it will be much easier to turn that thermostat up to 78°F.
Paul in KY
@Roger Moore: I live in the KY and in last 3 weeks we’ve had temperatures in mid 90s and on up. Also with good ole Southern humidity. They will pry my AC from my (hopefully) cold, dead fingers…
The Europeans that think we’re ladedaaa about AC need to take a KY Summer and then reassess, IMO.
My wife is from Uganda and says it gets hotter here than anything she ever experienced over there. A friend of ours is from Kenya and says same thing.
Bill Arnold
Just parenthetically, my back of the envelope calculations (slightly better than a Fermi estimate) suggest that the gigawatt of electricity used by those Texas bitcoin miners is burning about 25 human lives per day in the fullness of time, for electricity generated from coal (about 1/2 that for NatGas). With renewables in the mix (true in Texas), fewer (but >0) daily sacrifices to Mammon. That’s assuming that global heating will end up roughly halving the global human population, mostly though death, and divying up responsibility for deaths (and other negative consequences) for the excess carbon (roughly 1000 petagrams/gigatons) in the atmosphere in a scenario between RCP 4.5 and RCP 6.
Paul in KY
@Mart: When I lived down below Miami, one January it got down to low 40s/high 30s. They were freezing to death down there. Turned out almost no houses had any insulation or a furnace for heat.
Bill Arnold
@Halteclere:
Dress codes for males in corporate America really should change, to short sleeves, and shorts in the warmer-outside months, to more closely align with female employees.
I’ve never worn long sleeves in corporate jobs in an office, let alone a wool jacket. (unless heating was broken for some reason.)
Kent
We lived in Waco Texas for 13 years, through some serious heat waves.
One of the most infuriating things not discussed here is that Texas architecture is deliberately inefficient when it comes to AC, cooling, and air circulation. Texas suburbs are full of big sprawling 1-story homes with huge footprints, high ceilings, and no air flow from room to room. They are often made with masonry siding and dark asphalt shingle roofs which are also the worst thing for keeping a home cool compared to say white painted siding and reflective metal roofs.
Texans used to know how to make homes that were naturally cooling. You use metal roofs, put on big eaves or better yet, porches that wrap around the entire home, and then have air flow between rooms. So by opening some windows and running some ceiling fans you could cool the home, even on hot days.
Today’s McMansions are the exact opposite. And you can’t actually cool most homes by opening windows since there are no eaves to speak of and the sun is blasting directly on the sides of your house.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@cain: I love how Republican politicians just HATE socialism and sharing, until they need something, and then it’s But, But , But WE NEED IT! These selfish sociopaths refused to believe that the scary damaging effects of climate change are not some future problem their kids or grandkids will have to deal with. It’s here, now and going to get a lot worse.
trollhattan
@Bill Arnold:
I worked on them to make pants optional (The Baud Exemption) under our Return to Work scheme but did they listen? Nooooooo.
Lacuna Synecdoche
‘@torriangray via Anne Laurie @ Top:
It’s hardly benevolence. Ethereum is about 75% down from it’s peak last November, and bitcoin is down around 70% from the same high point. Also, crupto-mining relies on electricity. The more expensive electricity is, the lower the profit.
So shutting down your crypto-mining while the price is down, and the cost of mining is up due to competition for supply, is not benevolence.
It’s just common sense from a profit perspective.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Kent: I live in the NorthEast but have lived a lot of places including Florida, Guam and Hawaii. One thing that stuck me was the old houses and government buildings built before A/C was common were built to take advantage of prevailing winds, ceiling fans, and had tall, wide windows, and screened “sleeping porches”. We are going to have to start thinking that way again I guess…
trollhattan
@Kent: As lots shrink then shrink some more here in CA, I’m amused at how developers now cram McMansions within arms reach of one another, utterly out of proportion to the site.
Ya know, you might consider skipping the fourth bedroom and bathrooms number four and five, plus the third garage door for the boat and/or RV, but will you?
They all look great strung across some hillside, all in their particular shade of Madagascar Putty or Sahara beige.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Bill Arnold: Exactly! expecting people to wear suit coats in the summer is ridiculous. and what is the purpose of ties anyway?!??
The Moar You Know
@Roger Moore: I don’t know where in SoCal you live, but I’ve always been in one of the beach cities (since 1972, when we moved down from NorCal) and you absolutely did not need air conditioning until around 2004 or so. Then we started getting the humidity coming up from the Gulf of California.
My wife and I installed whole-house A/C two years ago. Not optional anymore.
trollhattan
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone: The Hawaiian lanai is one of my favorite architectural features. You can do a lot of living in a lot of different types of weather, outside, protected from most weather.
HVAC systems like we have here on the mainland just aren’t a thing, not that some kind of auxiliary cooling isn’t needed at times.
Roger Moore
@VOR:
This is actually a vaguely sensible idea. You need enough power plants to supply all the power needed at the busiest time, but by definition that time comes about only rarely. If you just build for typical demand, you’ll need to shut users down when demand spiked. If you build for peak demand, you have power plants that are idle almost all the time.
The way to deal with that is to have “switchable demand”, i.e. users who can use power when there’s plenty of supply and switch off when supply is short. Some of this can come by having people time-shift demand that isn’t time sensitive, e.g. by running their electric car chargers and dishwashers in the middle of the night rather than during peak hours. But you can also have users like Bitcoin miners who switch off completely when demand peaks. Users who agree to switch off will often get cheaper rates the rest of the time as encouragement.
Another way this works is that organizations that have emergency backup power might switch off the grid and onto their backup generators. My employer actually did that during the 2000 California Power crisis, and it was awful because they didn’t think it through, because we couldn’t seamlessly switch from grid to backup power. That was OK for our main hospital, because all their critical devices had battery backup, but nobody in research had the same. We had lots of equipment that needs to be powered on all the time, and even a 1 second power outage would shut everything down. We didn’t get much done that summer, and we wound up spending all the savings on power from being on the cheaper power plan was spent on getting uninterruptible power for every device on campus that couldn’t handle being shut down for a few minutes.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kent: don’t forget a green lawn just like a country house nineteenth century England!
I think someone here posted that highs above 100 F were predicted for London last week, I don’t know if that happened, but I just checked at 104 is predicted for Paris next week
Roger Moore
@The Moar You Know:
I live in Pasadena, so it definitely gets hot enough to want AC in the summer. My first place didn’t have it at all, so I didn’t have any choice but to tough it out. My second place did, but I was still comparatively young and foolish, and I stuck without AC even when it got frightfully hot. I guess I took advantage of other people’s AC by going in to work, shopping, etc. when it got really hot, but it was still hard to sleep during a heatwave. My current place has a central chilled water system, so the AC is coming out of my HOA dues whether I use it or not, and that has some effect on my willingness to use AC. Having a pet who would roast if I refused to use the AC is the dispositive factor, though.
HumboldtBlue
JaneE
Our Edison company just switched everyone to time-of-day, with early afternoon being the cheapest rate because of all the solar power available then. Not so long ago the campaign was “give your appliances the afternoon off”. I don’t think those changes apply to commercial users though.
Martin
I have one thing I tell anyone who asks me why I do what I do regarding climate change:
We have this attitude that nothing will ever change my standard of living. Technology and the sacrifice of others will always find a way to solve the next disaster before it affects me. That is magical thinking. Your standard of living *will* change, but you do have a choice – you can adapt to it in the ways that are easiest and best for you, or you can take the roll of the celestial dice and take the change that is imposed upon you. You can choose to drive less, or buy an electric car, or you can have the government or the automakers force that upon you by banning gas, or you can have a fire or tornado or hurricane supercharged by climate change destroy your home.
None of us will get out of this in the same state we entered, but we all have a choice whether to move to that new state willingly, unwillingly, or with a thermal blanket over our shoulders and a Red Cross volunteer handing us a bottle of water. Every day you wake up, you start the day with that choice. And every day, 99% of people choose the last option.
Ken
@Roger Moore: I get the part where this is analogous to having a 16-inch water line installed to your house so that you can install sprinklers that will instantly put out any fire.
What I’m not following is the part analogous to leaving all your toilets flushing constantly to use the water, with the understanding that you’ll shut off the toilets if you need the water for the fire sprinklers.
JaneE
@Halteclere: I don’t know the age of the women that you work with, but menopause can do a number on your internal thermostat. Every place I worked, and even now 20 years into retirement, if there are a group of women, half of us want it more cold and the others want more warmth. At this point it is just funny, because the temp is always within one or two degrees, but I can tell who will say it is “too cold” if I feel halfway comfortable, and if I am dying of heat, I know at least one of my friends is finally feeling warm enough.
Martin
@Roger Moore: Boy, you have a more favorable scope for ‘vaguely’ than I do.
You’re running into the energy model that experts believe CA is going to land in, where supply of energy isn’t curtailed due to cost, but demand is. Solar and wind have no marginal cost. It costs you money to turn them off. So you want to restructure demand to align with when they operate. Yeah, I guess in theory you could use crypto for that purpose, but then crypto collapses because nobody can perform a transaction at night. And as if the crypto folks give a single shit about the well-being of anyone but themselves.
Instead, I think you need to look at other utility functions that we want to do and that benefit us to do more of, and see if they can be structured in a way that be intermittent in the manner of that renewable generation. Two *large* categories come to mind:
In both cases the economic problem is that idling the plant undermines your ability to pay for the initial construction. But that’s already a problem plaguing the power generation with peaker plants only running intermittently. The state needs to develop some new economic system that would allow these kinds of plants to be financed and to operate. That’s not all that hard to do.
One thing that I really want in my house is a standard that allows my appliances to be able to talk to my panel. I want a button on my dishwasher for ‘run when we have a surplus of solar’, and the same for my battery charging things like my Roomba and gardening equipment. There is no residential standard like that to hook into and I would think a decent bit of demand shaping just inside of the house could be done off of that. Hell, I could have a 72 degree AC thermostat for when we’re off the grid, and a 76 degree for when we’re on the grid.
There’s just nothing there or even on the horizon best as I can tell. Personally I think the smart home standards like Matter/Thread need to expand to incorporate it.
trollhattan
@Ken:
Adding total demand to a system that has a demonstrated capacity deficit and is by design isolated from electricity importation, doesn’t hold much promise. IDK if “mining” can switch on and off at a whim, based on when electricity is cheap, but am dubious.
CA’s peaking plants are natural gas fired and the cost is higher than that from solar and wind. Meantime, our demand valleys are between midnight and about six, when solar isn’t. This isn’t to say spot market pricing follows the actual cost of generation–that’s above my pay grade.
R-Jud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Those mega highs are coming to the UK this weekend/early next week. Current forecast here in the Midlands has Sunday at 89 F, Monday 94, Tuesday 98. If that holds it’ll easily be 100+ down in London.
gene108
We figured out how to heat homes thousands of years before we figured out how to cool homes.
I think that explains the view that A/C is a luxury to some extent.
A lot of us lived without A/C at some point in our lives. Very few people have lived without a means to heat a home for generations.
gene108
@R-Jud:
The highs in Western Europe are unbelievable. Parts of Portugal are 40C+ (above 100 F). That’s peak summer temperatures in most of India.
Jay
We currently live in a 22nd floor, south facing 1bdr in Burquitlam.
We have in 2 1/2 years, never turned the heat on, and even during last years heat dome that killed over 600 people, don’t have AC.
Over the years we have learned passive methods to manage extreme heat(+45c) and cold(-45c). Things as simple as pulling in cooler air at night and sealing and shading the windows at night.
Did you know that some window “treatments”, have an R value?
sab
@Kent: When we lived in Florida in the 1960s all the older houses were thick cinderblock walls, with louvered windows on every wall that you could open at night to let cool air in. The cinderblock walls kept heat out in the daytime. Air-conditionimg was bery nice, but you could live without it. Our schools weren’t even air-conditioned.
Asparagus Aspersions
I know it’s a dead thread but just chiming in to say that in Paris we finally caved about four summers ago, and bought a small portable AC unit, which we keep in our storage space downstairs, and bring up in July, so we can turn it on during heatwaves.* It cools down the apartment enough so that we can sleep. We’re in an incredibly shoddily insulated building, built in the 80s. Thin walls, windows that let in both heat and cold, etc.
*This year for the first time we brought it up in June. When I first moved here, I scoffed at the idea of an AC unit – “one week a year is so not worth it!” My tune has changed, along with the climate.