"... half of Phoenix residents are at risk of an emergency room visit or worse if their electricity fails during a future heat wave, according to a recent study. Air conditioning is what keeps people there comfortable—and alive—a growing fraction of the year. The extreme heat already kills hundreds of Phoenix-area residents every year, a number that went up by 25 percent from 2021 to 2022."
Ah, here's an article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/upshot/the-all-conquering...
It's pretty crazy because growing up in central/northern Alberta, I never even really encountered air conditioning until I was into my early 20s and moved to southern Ontario (where living without it would be complete hell in the summer, hot humid disgusting "I feel like I'm being smothered in someone's armpit" summers). Our cars never had it and our houses certainly didn't need it; just an open window. Summers were mild and the heat when it came was a dry heat.
But now when I go home to visit there, A/C is everywhere there, and it's frankly needed; the last summer I spent time out at my parents west of Edmonton there were multiple days in a row over 30C and it was frankly quite hellish and them having a ground source heat pump that cooled the house was a godsend. Just the 2-3C difference in peak temperatures from the 80s til now is enough to push it over the edge into new territory.
In the 30+ years I have lived in Arizona, I have experienced probably 2 outages, lasting a total of a few hours (one was when a car hit a transformer, the other was when a microburst knocked a bunch of aging poles down).
The last outage I had was like 6-8 years ago.
After a flood/hurricane/nuclear strike, they would provide enough coolness to keep people alive for a few days.
Same with cold weather, if the gas/electric goes out during the winter. There's really only a few places one can live with moderate enough weather to avoid those scenarios.
It seems like there’s an important scale issue there. So the risk isn’t really the same everywhere.
People who retire there most likely go up to Flagstaff in the summer, or further north.
Or they just have good A/C.
do you really not see a difference between a place where the event is much more likely to happen for a much longer % of the time than another place where the same event is much less likely to occur?
I 100% disagree with this...
Heat is made by everything, waste heat is a byproduct of all modern things, and there are TONS of easy low cost ways to make heat even it is just as simple as burning something.
Also the body makes head naturally so adding layers to trap this heat does not require continual inputs from an outside resource
Cooling on the other hand is MUCH harder, and electricity is really the only avenue to make cooling. Even if you say use ICE, well that Ice was made at some point by a freezer running on Electricity
IMO hot climate is MUCH MUCH more dangerous than cold, which is why I choose to live in an area where there are only 1 or 2 months of even remotely hot climate.
As I told my last HVAC... Heat I can make 100 ways... Cooling I need central air for...
I grew up around the 38N parallel, gross enough to get too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. Every winter people froze to death, just the same.
It's not as bad as Phoenix percentage wise, but it's still a risk in the vast majority of places that people in the US live.
My Claim is providing people with emergency heat is FAR FAR FAR FAR easier and cheaper than providing people with emergency cooling.
Do "at risk" people die in the north from the cold, absolutely but I am not sure how that means the cold is worse
As it stands right now, just from my daily activities my waste heat in my home makes my home about 10-15 degrees above ambient. Meaning in the winter if my target temp is 65deg, it would have to be 50 degrees or colder outside before I would even think about running my heat.
In the winter time that means my AC is working hard to not only combat the outside temp but the internal waste heat from computers, cooking, TV's, humans, etc.
Gas-powered fridges and coolers have existed for about two hundred years and are still a normal technology today - often used for camping and off-grid life.
Here's a whole bunch of propane fridges for your viewing pleasure: https://bensdiscountsupply.com/collections/propane-refrigera...
* citation needed.
Unless you have a terribly insulated shelter, blankets, coats, and friends will keep you warm enough to the extent that unless you are not really capable of taking basic care of yourself, you're not dying of the cold when your heat goes out. You can always do more insulation, and you only need so much for your body to keep you warm.
With heat though you run out of things to do.
There is a difference between an impaired person or a person doing something unwise dies of the heat or cold... and there being an environment where there's nothing a healthy adult can do to survive without powered heating/cooling.
I used to work in the Middle East, and their traditional structures with central pool and windcatcher/chimney design remained quite livable even when it was over 45°C outside, with zero active cooling.
Sort of makes one wonder how we’re ever going to colonize Mars so we’re not a single planet species.
Or pretty much all Australian cities in summer?
In Arizona, in the middle of summer, you could be buck naked and you'd still overheat (and get burnt, to boot).
That's actually incorrect. Heating takes considerably more energy.
When you're cooling you're looking at a temperature delta of at most 20 degrees C/45 degrees F between outside and inside. When you're heating, it can be easily be twice that. Or even more, in parts of Canada or the Great Lakes states.
Air conditioning is a heat pump and can achieve up to 300% efficiency. Whereas most houses in cold climates use furnaces, which have at most 98% efficiency.
Now that we have more efficient cold-climate heat pumps all of this may gradually change. But as of right now, what you're saying is wrong.
But that's very different than claiming than cooling is more efficient than heating. In A/Cs the ratio of energy (in the form of heat) removed to energy consumed is very low, around 10-15%.
In furnaces the ratio of energy added to energy consumed is around 90%, which was pretty good until the emergence of heat pumps. There almost all the energy consumed is added to the output in addition to all the energy removed from the other side. That's why the efficiency in heat pumps is beyond 200%.
In summary, no. Cooling is not more efficient than heating. But given the temperature differential when cooling the energy consumption is usually higher.
Why is that?
Obviously I'm referring to efficiency in practice. In theory, heating and cooling should be equally efficient for a perfect heat pump, right?
No. You can't directly compare "efficiency" numbers across different energy sources. My understanding is that the efficiency of gas powered electricity generation is around 33%, meaning that powering a heat pump with a COP of just under 3 will be of similar end-to-end efficiency as burning the gas directly in a condensing boiler/furnace.
I'm well aware the figure in my above comment could be off by a decent amount due to transmission efficiency, what specific plants are generating marginal power, etc. But it's at least framing the comparison right.
To a consumer, comparing nameplate efficiencies as you say makes the most sense. I can easily find out how much a joule of electricity and a joule of natural gas cost me. Then multiply those with efficiency to see which is cheaper.
Based on a figure I just saw from someone else describing their setup (1.75 COP at 5 deg F), and taking into account transmission losses etc, the worst case would seem to be significantly less efficient than burning natural gas directly in a condensing furnace.
This isn't meant as some sort of knock against heat pumps! In fact I'm tentatively planning to add a heat pump to my own home within the next several years. Focusing on a worst case is still not an overall comparison of performance, but rather just one data point in the evaluation of a given design.
Multiplying the cost of the energy source by the nameplate efficiency is indeed another sensible way of comparing across technologies. But that isn't what you did in your original comment, where you juxtaposed two different types of efficiency numbers. That was my only point in my original comment.
If I'm too cold and my power goes out I have a lot of options to survive. I can put on more clothes, get under a blanket, light my furniture on fire, etc
If I'm too hot and my power goes out, I die. Once the wet bulb temperature gets above a certain level in shade, there's nothing that can be done to stop me from dying except Air Conditioning.
Hint: Phoenix is at 17% humidity today, even their all time high of 122 doesn’t push the wet bulb temp out of the safe range.
Now include climate change raising the temperature and changing the length and severity of monsoon season, continued development raising the heat island effect.
It doesn't matter what the average wet bulb temperature over the entire coty over a long period of time. It matters what the peak wet bulb temperature is for significant number of vulnerable people. The wet bulb temperature only has to get very high once to kill a large swath of people.
I understand just fine the wet bulb temperature has been within safe levels for the vast majority of people so far. My concern is about the future.