Energy crunch concerns lead Japan’s government to call for reduced AC use

This is also the reason why Toyota is pushing Hydrogen vehicles so hard, the Japanese grid can't handle EVs. Hydrogen they could theoretically manufacture, store and distribute locally.

Japan also uses LNG which has a very different price than Henry Hub.

[0]https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/rngwhhdm.htm

1. Ice thermal storage. You freeze ice at night and melt it during the day to cool your building. Only used for large buildings - check out Chicago's district cooling for an awesome example.

2. Adiabatic and hybrid cooling towers. These are HVAC equipment that can switch between regular and a "wet mode" where they evaporate water to cool the AC coil and reduce electricity usage.

3. Better automation tools. Building automation systems are fully programmable (e.g., switch schedules when outdoor temperature is past a certain threshold), unlike most programmable thermostats which can run a fixed schedule but not much else.

I mentioned that this one struggles to hold 75 when it's much over 100 degrees outside and was told it doesn't matter what system I buy, that will always be true. The systems can only pull down the temperature around 25 degrees Fahrenheit. Is that true? If so, how do stores hold their temperature so low?

Presumably the target temperature will swing less than the outside temperature making it always more efficient when it’s cooler outside.

There is the added complication of how good your insulation is, if it’s bad it might use less energy cooling when it’s hot outside.

However the driving issue isn’t really efficiency but peak power going beyond capacity. Peak usage is in the middle of the day, any off peak usage is better than near peak usage.

However, you do increase the rate of heat loss because there will be a larger temperature difference between the inside and the outside, so it does depend on how well insulated you are.

That adds up to ~3 medium intensity incandescent light bulbs. Unless you live in a very small apartment, I think you're still coming out way ahead on energy usage.

Air conditioning for a small room starts at something like 500W (and most are much more).

Most apartments only have a single exterior wall, so it's hard to get a cross breeze going through unless you open your door and ask your across-the-hall neighbor to do the same.

If the whole atmosphere is hot day and night, there's literally no way to cool down without using extra energy.

In some places they did, but then the entire thing was / is designed around it: qanats, wind-catchers, very narrow streets to provide shade and funnel winds.

And basically dead afternoons, you'd live in the early morning and late afternoon / early night e.g. the spanish "siesta".

TLDR: heat-pump based AC, auto-tinting windows, lots of insulation (double-paned windows, etc.). The architect who designed the previous building admitted it's probably no longer possible to build modern buildings without A/C, due to density, computers, and climate change.

I think the closest western equivalent would be a "transom window".

- Lithium-ion battery fires are considered a Class B fire, so a standard ABC or dry chemical fire extinguisher should be used.

- I'm not sure. I'm sure it's an industrial process but I can't imagine that lithium can not be recycled.

2) A properly designed PV-battery system has little fire risk, and probably less than a tank full of gasoline or diesel fuel or pressurized propane gas (which go off like bombs during wildfires).

You also have to consider whether or not a grid-tied system or a completely off-the-grid system is the optimal choice. This depends a lot on local utility policy (net metering means you get paid as a power provider if you're feeding more power to the grid than you use), and whether or not you want reliable power if the grid goes down, i.e. can you disconnect from the grid and just use your battery bank for power at night, and so on. A reputable installer will have answers to these questions for your local area.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8

Not exactly applicable of course, but I'm just trying to give you an idea of where I think the disconnect comes from.

Honestly, I get it. How many people ask about the ethical concerns when it comes to having traditional utilities hooked up to their home? I've honestly never once thought about what my particular power company does to the environment.

Preface: everything you do has an environmental cost, because you are a human, and on top a human living in a developed country (so I assume), understand this cost and understand that despite things having costs it is generally better to be environmentally conscious and take environmentally conscious routes than not doing it

Depends on what type of battery you are using, lead acid batteries such as cars are common and already produced at scale despite their environmental cost, because battery banks do not have weight limitations it is generally recommended to not use lithium for them and instead use other types of batteries for the task

Lithium batteries have different processing costs, if you are using lithium assume that the workers are being paid more or less fairly at market rates, if you are using lead, then your guess is as good as mine because of the sprawling production line, who knows what an iron miner in west papua earns/month, any product you ever buy will have human suffering embedded to it as a cost, any product, because suffering is inherent to both human existence and production of goods at competitive prices, that's how it is, deal with it

> What changes are happening to emergency services and fire now that we have a battery, similar to car or marine batteries, which are difficult to extinguish en masse?

No changes are happening, and you need to deal with that uncertainty, changes will start to happen when enough lithium based vehicles start setting themselves on fire and people dying that the system is forced to react and develop countermeasures, the world is ruled by institutional inertia, no changes will happen until that inertia is overcome by these new forces, which will happen eventually, only after enough accidents have happened and attention has been called to the issue

> How are these recycled? I dont mean, just ship it to X company for rebate, I mean what actually happens to the waste products and how are those neutralized?

Unknown. Lead acid batteries can be recycled, unknown if tightly packaged/glued lithium composites wrapped in plastics akin to tetrapak can be recycled, there are facilities which do it, they grind the batteries to dust for it tho, then reprocess what they can

But, the good thing is that unlike tetrapak recycling there's lots of money on the line for novel methods of lithium recycling

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/recycled-lithium-...

But yeah, overall it is a good outlook and it is developing fast vs current state of affairs with fossil fuels

This means the stuff needs to be dug up only once and it can be used and reused for decades.

This is infinitely better than digging up more and more fossil fuels and literally burning them up in smoke.

- Lithium is the primary element and is primarily sourced from salt basins. It's not mined so much as it is skimmed from salt lake brines and such. It's in the top three elements in the periodic table which also puts it among the most common elements in the known universe. There are sometimes environmental concerns about lithium mining sometimes getting "chemical slurries" released into downstream water sources, but even (especially?) "cheap" mining operations want to avoid them because there are often other things they could sell if they recaptured those "slurries".

- Cobalt is the only "rare earth metal" often involved in a shrinking minority of battery Lithium Ion compositions (many are Cobalt-free already or "mostly no Cobalt"). Despite the periodic table group name "rare earth metal", Cobalt is not that all that rare on Earth and for centuries was a "waste product" coming out of Nickel and Tin mines known mostly for its usefulness in blue paints (which is why the word "cobalt" is so associated with blue today). Nickel and tin mines aren't great, but people are always going to mine nickel and tin for their many, many uses. Cobalt is just going to keep being a "waste product" of that. But many Lithium Ion batteries don't need Cobalt any more in their formulations anyway.

- Fire and emergency services are expected to get retraining on Lithium Ion batteries, but my understanding is mostly for high voltage concerns rather than extinguishing concerns. A classic car/marine battery is a Lead Acid composition, and far more toxic (lead poisoning; chemical/acid burns). It's also a lot lower voltage as most Lead Acid batteries can barely move 12 volts in a steady current. Lithium Ion batteries can deliver a lot more voltage faster and learning to safely disconnect the batteries is much more important (because the risk of an electric shock is much worse). To my understanding, once circuits are safely disconnected (and many large Lithium Ion battery packs have multiple redundant systems to do so as automatically as possible at this point) extinguishing fires is generally easier than a Lead Acid battery.

- To my understanding: Lithium is easily recycled. It's a metal that forms salts easily. Cobalt is straight forward to recycle in most battery compositions, but rarely worth the effort economically (because Cobalt is a "waste product" of other mining).

ETA:

- Better than recycling is reuse. As far as we can tell the reuse cycles for lithium ion batteries are relatively extremely high. Very few EV car batteries have left their "primary usage" yet (as car batteries), even with just about a decade and a half of car sales already. Almost none of those that did move into "secondary usage" in grid storage or other secondary uses have left those roles/needed recycling. Right now it seems like large Lithium Ion batteries may have multiple decades of time in primary and secondary usages long before recycling is even a direct need. (Yes, directly in contrast to small Lithium Ion batteries people experience in phones/laptops. Size and heat management change a lot of the experience/expectations.)

1) Most homes here do not have built in AC. People use the portable ones. Heat pumps are a thing too. 2) We have a ridiculous amount of hydro-power available, and some of that being the cheapest around.

It's the difference between $36/MWh and $110/MWh.

They control the thermostats and so they get set far too cold for people who are just sitting. Gender doesn't seem to make any difference (in my workplace it's women that control the thermostats and they set it to freezing).

Blasting the AC is usually symptomatic of a poorly-implemented HVAC system. Someone in the building is working in an office that has poor circulation, so they complain until someone with control turns the thermostat down a few degrees. Everywhere else in the building becomes a little chillier. People start complaining it's too cold. It gets turned up a few degrees. Repeat.

It's been a while since I worked in anything akin to a Japanese cubicle hell, but I've worked in a lot of female-dominated offices. Anecdotally:

> in my workplace it's women that control the thermostats and they set it to freezing

Before HVAC automation and smart/demand-response systems took that perk away from them (an early casualty in the war-on-women), IME it was usually middle-aged women who governed the thermostat. Biological factors (pregnancy, menses, etc.) lead them to perceive ambient temperature as being hotter than it actually is, and so they set the thermostat to temperatures that "feel" sane to them. Hormones are a poorly-understood beast-- assuming you're male, you'll experience this yourself if you ever have testosterone fluctuations.

Women also tend(ed?) to work around a lot of heat-producing appliances like faxes, laser printers, copiers, CRTs, and underspec desktop workstations with CPUs perpetually pegged at 100%. None of this was accounted for in building designs from the past.

Untrue. Energy losses in hydrogen storage and transmission are significant (11%) but much smaller than the losses at the electrolysis step (24%) and the redox step (46%).