Cooling Europe

Europe heatwave: Air conditioning creates political divide as France records hottest day

France is being forced to re-think its longstanding reservations about air-conditioning as temperatures soar.

Her break with what she called "anti-clim dogma" is significant because until now the Green movement in France has regarded air-conditioning as the worst of solutions to climate change.

Far from attacking the root causes of global-warming, activists said, recourse to la clim was merely attenuating the effects of global-warming.

To the extent that concern exists, it is misguided. Not that cooling isn't a huge challenge. Cooling is going to be a major global power drain in the future, for houses, businesses and data centres alike.

As everyone on the planet becoming affluent enough to want climate control, and as most people live in regions significantly hotter than Europe, and as we will suffer the additional burden climate change, temperature control more than anything else will drive demand growth. Even so, we are going to spend much more energy on heating than on cooling, and managing those two tasks is related.

Keeping cool and warm could become an energy and environmental disaster if we were stuck with using old technology and techniques. So we shouldn't do that, and a lot of thought and experimentation over the last few decades has gone into developing better and more efficient approaches.

What is your heat strategy?

Major part of our energy goes to heating and cooling. Heat is less useful and convenient than electricity, but by using, storing, moving…

We will need both active and passive heating and cooling techniques, operating in concert.

For some areas the grid may be a limiting factor for active climate control. During times of extreme heat or extreme cold energy consumption spike, and unless the grid is very robust, that causes problems. For heat waves solar PV and storage is brilliant, as long as the solar cells themselves are reasonably cool. In the worst cases the panels themselves will need cooling to perform optimally.

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However, a (two-way) air-to-air heat pump costs only slightly more than a old-style AC, and then you got heating as well as cooling. Many of these buildings have had no real alternative to gas-based heating before, and now they got one. Even in climate terms this is a win.

Instead of trying to resist AC, it is better argue they should be heat pumps, and that it is better a full energy audit and include that in the building's maintenance plan. Especially as there might be overlooked weak spots and other quick (and cheap) fixes.

Anything structural can be very expensive. It is cheapest to do when the house is built, second to that during any major reconstruction, which typically happens every 30-50 years. An owner risks making an investment that instead of paying for itself in 10 years as planned, will have to be replaced with something better in 5.

Ultimately, of course, reducing the adverse effects of heating to air condition, is to miss the problem entirely.

French farmers suffer arid crops, heat-stricken animals

France's current heatwave is taking a toll on farmers, who are seeing livestock die and are racing against time to harvest cereals without sparking fires in the tinder-dry crops.