US Olympic and other teams will bring their own AC units to Paris | Hacker News Reader

US Olympic and other teams will bring their own AC units to Paris

apnews.com

55 pointsimpish920867 comments

> According to the International Energy Agency, fewer than 1 in 10 households in Europe has air conditioning, and the numbers in Paris are lower than that. The study said that of the 1.6 billion AC units in use across the globe in 2016, more than half were in China (570 million) and the United States (375 million). The entire European Union had around 100 million

Lee Kuan Yew attributed the success of Singaporean government to the invention of AC: https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew.... I wonder if the widespread lack of air conditioning in Europe is part of the reason Northern European and Scandinavian countries are more efficient and organized than Mediterranean European countries.

> Wow. Europe is poor.

Edit : parent has since edited his message to something else, my reply was to his original comment, comprised strictly of what I quoted.

Wow, you lack knowledge of the matter? I wonder what makes you think it's a money thing, because it's not.

Even brand new homes built today may not have any AC, or only AC in a few specific pieces, simply be cause of the need: you didn't need AC at any time of the year before, a very hot day meant 35 degrees Celsius.

The need now comes from climate change and heatwave being more common and hitting harder, year after year.

As for the actual comment : I don't think your understand the difference between the traditional heat in Singapore and the Mediterranean heat, those are at two very different point of the scale...

Yes. Us euros are poor and dumb. The lack of AC, or HVAC, is a great example.

Sorry for the edit—my initial reaction was based on climate control being a pretty baseline American standard. It looks like the historical average for Paris is still in the high 70s in the summer, which is a few degrees lower than Boston. But even before recent heatwaves, 90% of households in Boston had air conditioning: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/06/20/science/boston-summer....

It's not about being poor. First, the climate didn't require AC in most of the Europe, until ~10 years ago. You had a few hot days, and that's it. Second, thermal isolation in the US is extremely bad quality. I think people could cut their AC usage by half if they had proper thermal isolation in their houses. Third, northern Europe countries still don't have a climate to justify buying an AC.

Specifically, American houses lack thermal mass due to being constructed mainly from wood. Concrete and brick will buffer over a week or so of heat before it warms up too much.

In Florida, most of the homes are built from concrete brick with wood trusses. There are apartments made from wood and concrete.

It’s not the heat completely - it is also the humidity. You can bear up to 80 F before it starts to feel uncomfortable. Humidity will make even 75F uncomfortable.

Ofc, as far south as Florida the absence of cold makes the buffer function of limited use. And indeed, humidity is even worse than heat.

We have high humidity in Europe as well. For example the average here in the Netherlands is 77% where in Florida it's 75% based on a quick Google.

Relative humidity isn't a great indicator of comfort. It's better to look at dew point. The Netherlands is not only cooler on average but also has a lower dew point. This shouldn't be surprising given each country's latitudes.

Both regions have high humidity, but Florida tends to have higher average humidity levels, particularly in the summer months. Florida has a subtropical to tropical climate, characterized by high temperatures and humidity, especially in the summer. Florida experiences high humidity levels throughout the year, often ranging from 70% to 90%. Summer months are particularly humid, with frequent afternoon thunderstorms.

The Netherlands has a temperate maritime climate, influenced by the North Sea.

Florida and the Netherlands are not close in comparison.

I’m sorry, but it is just mind boggling to suggest that Netherlands and Florida have comparable weather in any sense. You wouldn’t suggest that the weather in Netherlands is as hot as in, say, Italy or Greece, and Florida is even hotter than these two.

I'm not saying it's as hot here as it is in Florida. But we've been breaking records left and right up to the point where I've purchased an AC (a crappy mobile one for lack of better options here for rented apartments) because we go through months every summer now where I can barely sleep without one anymore.

My point was that people often don't realize how humid it is here. You apparently also can't believe it. And how our buildings are not made to keep heat out, but rather in. So I expect many more ACs to be sold here as well in the coming years.

It might just be a month or two each year. And it might be worse for you. But it's also getting pretty bad here already thanks to climate change. And that's not going to improve anytime soon thanks to all of us.

Is it possible to build so that hear is kept in but not out? I sort of thought that heat flow was bidirectional.

Yes, mostly by using insulating (double) glass to let warmth in in the form of light that then warms up the interior. Think greenhouses. Surround that with poorly insulated walls and limited ventilation and in cold weather they'll leak out heat while in warm weather they'll also heat up in the sun and radiate that in.

Thermal mass doesn't matter much because the air in a typical home is replaced every hour.

Any home with an ACH nat of 1 that's attempting to condition the air (heating or cooling) is wasting a mind boggling percentage of the energy. Surely that's not the natural ventilation rate of the _typical_ home? That would imply that 50% of homes are worse.

This reference suggests that the mean air change rate in southern europe is 1.1 +/- 0.8 ac/h. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265511654_Proportio....

Do you live in a wind-tunnel?

But if it's hot air touching cool brick, won't the air cool down quicker than the brick warms up?

The air inside is only a tiny fraction of a building's mass.

I would have thought than being in power for 40 years, being an island, and being in the post ww2 years (overall global growth, commerce growing but not globalization, China still weak,….) would be more important to Singapore’s fantastic evolution than AC…

interesting idea. the result is that singapore has two seasons:

indoors and outdoors

the downside is that for some buildings you need to bring a jacket because the AC is cooling just to much. when i lived in singapore we eventually just decided to get comfortable with the heat and humidity and rarely used the AC at home.

It’s the same in Malaysia. Indoor spaces are freezing to the point I wear fall/winter clothing if I know I’ll be in a mall or airport.

Lack of AC leads countries to be more efficient.. how?

Seems like a big leap

I think they're saying the lack of need for AC

Got it but what does that have to do with efficiency or what specifically is more efficient ?

Temperature affects performance on cognitive tasks. A USC study showed the optimal temperature for men was under 70 degrees, though women prefer a higher temperature. https://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-office-temperature-wome...

Not OP, but come on, would you rather work in sweltering heat and humidity with sweat coming off your body, or a cool environment? Doesn't matter if indoors or outdoors, and if it's physical or mental work.

I remember seeing an article from many years ago that said at year X (was it 2050, 2100?), the number of heat days in Singapore where factories would have to stop work might reach 365..

there is a reason why the idea of a siesta during midday is an old tradition in spanish culture

Nothing to come on about, OP said lack of AC makes you more efficient. I still don't understand how.

Yup. While I'm very pro-climate-measures, hosting guests for the event where they must be at absolute peak performance at events for which they have trained for typically over a decade is NOT the time to skimp on environmental controls.

Room temp of 23°-26°C (73°-79°F) may be fine for ordinary couch-potato activities, but not for athletes needing to optimize for performance in the heat. The design is simply not fit for the actual use case, and should have provided the ability to set cooler temps. Optimizing the environment around the competitions, including everything up to bringing their own pillows on tour for sleeping is not uncommon at this level of performance and has been shown to make a difference. The building officials failed to understand the priorities of the assignment. Too bad.

I can't sleep if the temperature is a few degrees warmer than normal. Imagine training for 4+ years and then not sleeping before the biggest event of your life, because of poor planning. Consistency is key for these atheletes.

If emissions were a big enough issue for the hosts, then they shouldn't be flying tens of thousands of tourists & atheletes to come watch some sports. AC units are a drop in the bucket.

Yup. And ironically, the buildings are designed for one set of guests — the Olympic athletes — and if they had done their planning keeping the athlete's requirements as the primary criteria, they would have ended up with a far more climate-effective solution.

Instead, they have a cooling system that starts out as known-insufficient, and will definitely be unable to meet requirements in case of even normal heat waves, nevermind the what-used-to-be-outlier events that are now far more common. And, because of that planned inadequacy, hundreds or thousands of new temporary AC units will be built, transported, installed, and run at vast otherwise-unnecessary expense and emissions.

Building the initial system to meet requirements under any conditions found in the last two decades, and using modern AC technology that allows motors to run at variable speeds (vs compressor ON/OFF only) would be vastly more energy-efficient, and actually more climate-friendly.

Sheesh

> Optimizing the environment around the competitions, including everything up to bringing their own pillows on tour for sleeping is not uncommon at this level of performance and has been shown to make a difference.

The cycling team from UK have done more or less that in their campaign for the London/12 olympic games[1].

[1] - https://hbr.org/2015/10/how-1-performance-improvements-led-t...

Athletes on a once (or at least very infrequent) in a lifetime trip want to get some good sleep / cool off as needed. Yeah I can understand / support that.

In politics, signalling is more important than results.

I don’t know how that relates to what I said.

Isn't France primarily nuclear powered? Why the heck would an environmental plan for the village consist of "let's not use the major dominant energy benefit the country has".

This is why I hate the environmentalist movement: it's full of "lifestyle austerity" types who don't want to solve the problem unless everyone suffers "appropriately".

I propose the Olympic committee to be the one not using AC, as well as not traveling by airplane or car, until they offset the equivalent amount of CO2 production.

That’s a win-win! The athletes get to sleep well and we _also_ help the environment!

We all know how that proposal would fare.

I mean, if you want to lower the carbon footprints, don't have an Olympics. Travel to and from the games from outside Paris will cost a great deal of carbon.

They are using ground-source heat pumps for cooling, which are more efficient than air-source heat pumps. The target temperature has simply been set higher than some would prefer.

France using nuclear power is part of the problem. In summer 2022 and 2023, fewer than expected reactors were operational, for a number of reasons. Some of those reasons could repeat if the summer is hot and dry.

The problem is that we shut down a working reactor few years ago for political reasons and that we didn't build more for several decades. When NREs fail to provide enough electricity we don't get a news article, because otherwise it would be the headline almost every day.

2022 and 2023 were a bad time because of delayed COVID maintenance + issue detected of several reactors + heat. This was after decades of no problem.

The summer heat is here to stay and get worse so it should be taken into account when building new reactors.

The marginal increase in energy consumption from the olympics won't come out of the baseline nuclear energy supply.

Then take it out of the very cheap solar power + batteries that people swear we have. An entire olympic village is being built, new, at considerable expense - the carbon excess on that construction alone is going to be immense and that's all diesel ICE vehicles.

Instead of doing a stupid thing: seriously reducing the livability of the buildings in a way no one would really want, do the smart thing and build out the renewable capacity - with the bonus that you get to keep the renewable capacity afterwards.

(of course in reality, France has load following nuclear reactors: they can absolutely throttle up a little more to accommodate increased night time load, and power grid smoothing measures can ensure air conditioning the buildings works well with this - i.e. using variable speed compressors)

I agree.

I have heard many environmentalists who were horrified at the idea of non-polluting energy, because then everyone would use more energy, which was horrific to them.

I believe most environmental activists do not want to help humanity; they want to make humanity extinct.

Environmentalists are also ones who worked against building, which now makes it impossible to build out green infrastructure. So environmentalists are ones that fucked up the environment…

I would argue that's nearly always the goal of the loudest voices in the "movement." It's just the latest authoritarian mask worn by those who would control every aspect of our lives.

I hope someday we'll just enact a revenue-neutral carbon tax/dividend and be done with all the performative nonsense.

What do you mean by revenue neutral?

All money collected from the taxes is paid back out to the citizens, but on a per-capita basis. Due to how the distribution of wealth/spending/carbon footprint work, the majority of people would get back more than they paid in tax - it’s an extremely progressive tax. Flying a private jet or driving a motor yacht would become incredibly expensive even compared to their current cost, and would fund a lot of poorer people investing in decreasing their own bills via heat pumps, etc.

It’d also help increase blue collar worker leverage and encourage onshoring/reindustrialization, because it’d become less attractive to ship goods from other countries.

Don’t worry, we’ll find something similar to BS on.

So they basically have AC; they just don't allow you to set it below a certain temperature. And so lots of people will bring their own ACs to use besides the other one.

I think this will end up producing more CO2 in the end..

This is a Dupe but I'll repeat most of the rich world is doing this, it's the the poorer blacker countries that have the handicap.

They fly in 15,000 people (and 9000 for the Paralympics), watched by billions. What joke to then not do AC. This is of course 100% virtue signaling for the climate cult since the air-conditioners won't actually use any power if the temperature is correct using other methods.

Top athletes from rich countries literally use hyperbaric chambers in training and the Paris Olympics won't supply African countries many who are ex-colonies the ability to set a temperature.

  “We don’t have deep pockets,” said Donald Rukare,  who is president of the Uganda Olympic Committee. Rukare mentioned a sweltering international sports competition in Turkey a few years ago, where athletes stayed in rooms without air-conditioning. Some federations shipped in portable units; Uganda did not. “Because we didn’t have the money,” he said.

> The objective is to keep the rooms between 23-26 degrees

This is outside the optimal sleeping temperature FYI as a normal human being going to work. This really surprised me actually, but some say it should be as low as 18C.

Athletes will have added pressures, jet lag, and be sleeping odd hours to get to spec to perform for a few minutes for the millions of $ in training.

> This is outside the optimal sleeping temperature FYI as a normal human being going to work. This really surprised me actually, but some say it should be as low as 18C.

I'm definitely with you on that these athletes should do whatever they think is best for them for the few days that they're in the olympic village, but generally cooling down the entire world's bedrooms to 18C would be pretty catastrophic, at least using today's technology. One day, hopefully!

Assuming a bedroom with surface area of 50 m^2 and an insulation R-value of 2 m^2K/W and an outside temperature of 30C, 300W would be required to keep the room at 18C. Cooling down 8 billion such bedrooms would require 24TW, which represents approximately a 10% increase in global power consumption.

Certainly a lot, but doesn't seem "catastrophic" and is realistic with today's technology.

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