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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Is it really a problem? A/C is the dumb easiest thing to solve with renewable energy. We need most A/C when it's day and the sun is shining - much less need when it's dark or cloudy - so consumption almost matches supply of solar power. With some shift at the evening... yeah between some 6pm and 9pm there's still a lot of A/C demand but little to no solar... but this is the lowest hanging fruit for the most minimal amounts of deployed battery storage.

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It's only a problem if you're into virtue signalling your green cred by "swearing off air conditioning." There is a ton of low hanging fruit to make cooling more efficient, but people just don't consider it worth the cost (esp considering the opportunity cost vs thinking about almost anything else).

You must live in a deeply hostile world if you think that's how people function.

in the PNW, where a lot of people live in condos, it is not unheard of for HOAs (which basically all condos have) to be against the more efficient air conditioners and to force everyone to use the lowest efficiency inside-house, single or dual hose ones.

Why? Do they make a commission on electricity bills?

I'm not defending the practice, but a lot of HOAs prioritize aesthetics, and retrofitting AC into an existing unit is always going to end up with some kind of visible external machinery that may not harmonize with the existing design.

They don't like how the in-window unit ones look, and don't like how the heat pump external units look and/or don't want to pay to retrofit anything

It's pure aesthetics

This was sadly seen at the Paris Olympics. The village didn't have A/C for so-called environmental reasons, and teams from rich countries dragged portable units in because they (reasonably) did not accept the facilities provided.

It's one of those things that chips away at one's beliefs about the human spirit.

I have heard enough discussions about the Paris Olympics budget that I would consider that A/C was not provided for purely cost reasons.

I do agree myself that A/C is a luxury in most cases (at least in Paris) and many other things that would help the environment should be done before installing that.

This is a common belief but is actually not true. Heating is a necessity, and resistive heating is a very inefficient use of electricity. Heat pumps (using energy to pump heat up a temperature gradient) yields far greater coefficients of performance. Once you have a heat pump, you might as well use it to also cool things down in the summer.

All of France takes a break in August because it's too hot to work. This is only going to get worse with climate change.

Not sure what is "no true" from my comment as you were not specific, but at least to the suggestion of installing heat-pumps in Paris, this will be a much bigger investment than putting "some A/C". I don't think such an investment is more beneficial than (for example) transforming more of the side street parking to bike lanes (which seems to be what is happening).

What is too hot for you? For me an average a mean high temperature of 25 deg Celsius in August is reasonable (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Paris).

My point is just that viewing A/C as a luxury leads to more energy use. Yes, I think Europe needs to have a large scale deployment of heat pumps — not only for the climate benefits but also to lower dependency on Russian oil and gas. A/C just comes along for the ride as a thing that makes lives better. New developments like the Olympic village should all have heat pumps.

I would aim for maybe 95-97% of expected weather to be covered.

Apparently the officials relented and put portable units in the bedrooms but not in other areas. Certainly better than only rich countries getting them, but portable units are very inefficient.

(Also, air conditioning can be fully solar powered and in fact has synergistic effects with solar power. And also, making a permanent venue for the Olympics will probably save a lot more resources in the long run, but no one's willing to talk about that.)

Proper insulation and blasting the AC during solar excess could also be a way to shift the evening demand.

Production and consumption might match, but the grid throughput might not.

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