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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

I'd guess that a far bigger factor is that the US has a much higher percentage of houses the use electricity for room heating.

I believe that it is similar for water heating.

In the US there is also a high percentage of houses that use electricity for the stoves and oven and for clothes drying. A brief didn't turn up how much electricity is used for those things in the UK, but if it is like much of the rest of Europe I'd not be surprised if it is lower than in the US.

In the US around 26% of houses use electricity as their only energy source, compared to around 9% for the UK.

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Not to mention cooling. How many people in the UK even have air conditioning?

I've lived all over the UK, houses and apartments, and never had air-con.

You might get a week or so during summer when it's quite hot but then a large fan is sufficient.

Yeah whereas in the southern U.S. a lack of air conditioning is a medical emergency. It gets insanely hot down there!

It's technically uninhabitable. It only works because we have a lot of technology, similar to NL, the arctic and so on. There are a lot of areas in the world that we have essentially only borrowed as long as we can hold on to them but that are in most senses uninhabitable and hostile to unprotected life.

Is it uninhabitable? Maybe some specific areas in Arizona / New Mexico, the South Eastern US was already established States before air conditioning was even invented.

Yes, but not by these quantities of people. Critical infrastructure would be much harder to keep alive without AC and the same goes for the elderly. I would expect the average lifespan of the region to take a serious hit during a prolonged power outage in summer.

People used to die of cold, and so why not heat?

It was just the way things were.

People dying of heat in the US tend to have other serious medical conditions so it’s unlikely to change overall life expectancy significantly.

Also, peoples homes have been redesigned for AC. The most obvious being people used to sleep on upper story “Sleeping Porch” in the summers. Those living spaces have almost universally had walls added. There’s many more subtle architectural changes that have gone away such as ventilation above doors, setting homes up for cross ventilation etc. Most of which simple doesn’t make sense in a world with cheap AC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_porch / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_room etc

There are plenty of places where people live in hotter/more humid conditions. US dwellings and lifestyles are simply very badly adapted at natural conditions and the gap is made up for by expending energy.

I can see an underground metro requires air conditioning, but for most other things there are people in developing countries with higher temperatures who live without it.

"Uninhabitable" becomes meaningless if you dilute it to mean "you couldn't build a city-scale population centre here without some infrastructure". All cities need infrastructure!

Yea no. Been to Costa Rica many times and no one has AC. People aren’t dying on the streets. My brother in law lived there for 10 years with no AC and it’s hotter, for longer, than my home in the Deep South.

It's the combination of temperature, humidity, wind and other factors that poses health risks.

https://www.weather.gov/tsa/wbgt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature

This stuff can and does kill and if you're not aware of it then pay attention: this is one of the more direct consequences of climate change, it may well push zones that are currently marginally habitable right into inhabitable.

Agreed. I would guess some desert areas might not be habitable but that's only a portion of a couple states. You can definitely live in places like Florida without AC.

Not to diminish your point there, but globally, it is cold that tends to kill the elderly, not heat. Despite being much less newsworthy, illnesses triggered by the cold kill about ten times more than heat strokes and similar health issues from excessive heat.

Meaning that a heating outage in a cold region would have a vastly more devastating effect than an cooling outage in a warm region.

People used to live there before ACs. It is down to inefficient construction designs.

Spot on it’s very hot where I am and I run the AC about 9 months a year. My house has 2 units. Even in the winter there could be hot days where I’ll need to run it.

>In the US around 26% of houses use electricity as their only energy source, compared to around 9% for the UK.

Something that was interesting to me when I moved from California to central Oregon was that nearly everything was powered by electricity. I didn't even know anybody with a gas stove in Oregon.

I do not know anyone in Portland metro without a gas line to their house. Furnaces, stoves, and water heaters until recently use gas.

I am guessing central Oregon may have been too rural for it to make sense to install gas utilities everywhere?

Could be. We were also on the other side of an entire range of mountains so that may have also had something to do with it.

Rural uses Propane for gas

Midwest is a very common for most rural homes to have 500-1000 gal propane tanks. Propone is more expansive than NatGas but in cold weather it is still cheaper than resistive electric heat...

This seems to be true in the Boise Idaho area too. Our house was one of the few that had a gas stove.

Not sure about that, it looks like overall energy consumption still is almost there times as high in the US compared to the UK: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab... It may be worth to mention that in the UK, energy consumption seems to be particularly low, below the EU average.

And often that is good old resistive baseboard heating rather than a heatpump.

Vast majority of people use electricity for stoves in the US. Electric is also common for water heating. Less common to use electricity for space heating except for the South and for auxiliary rooms.

> Vast majority of people use electricity for stoves in the US.

Apparently about 68%. That shocked me. I thought for sure gas was more common based off personal experience.

https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/29082/most-common-type-of...

Yeah, it’s actually weird, because of the role it has played in the culture wars recently, but gas stoves are actually kind of a “coastal elite” phenomenon. Most common around California and New York City (and surrounding areas). And becoming a trendy feature in high end homes.

And unintuitive enough that I get downvoted for pointing it out. shrug

That's wild. I guess it's location dependent because I don't know anyone with an electric stove.

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