In much of the world, AC power demand peaks later in the day when solar power supply is minimal or zero. So pairing as you suggest would require a huge amount of storage capacity. Or in some places they could also use high voltage transmission lines to areas further to the west that are still receiving significant sunlight at that time.
Energy is only free at times when we don't actually need it.
A/C is interesting because it has something of a built-in capacity system. "Super" cool the building during times of the day when power is readily available, and that cooling then persists. You don't have to store the electrical power specifically.
Precooling or supercooling can maybe help a bit in a few areas but it won't make a huge difference in terms of solar power for AC. Most buildings don't have the thermal mass or insulation to gain much benefit. And you can't cool buildings below about 65 °F / 18 °C or else the occupants complain.
in the next video we're going to
show you how to improve the efficiency
of air conditioners and not by a small
amount it's estimated that approximately
$200 billion a year is used worldwide to
generate the electricity that drives air
conditioning so even a few per reduction
in the cost of running an air
conditioner would make a huge difference
and could save billions of dollars and
what we're going to show you isn't going
to improve the efficiency by a small
amount but by a huge amount so stay tuned
I was talking with someone from Greece recently who was experiencing a heat wave and they dont have AC. I am from the south eastern US where we are basically required to have AC for de-humidification as much as cooling - we would be overrun with mold and mildew without AC in the summer. Our heat indexes regularly reach 105F during the summer and sometimes much higher. I joked the other day that if our aquifers ever ran out of water we could probably get most of what we need with just a better dehumidifier.
Edit to add: just in case, you should never use water out of a dehumidifier for anything but grey water use cases unless you sanitize and purify it - it can make you very sick!
That's not really a joke. Even in Minnesota summers, I pull 2 gallons every couple days out of our basement air. That's enough for me. I've given serious thought to putting a couple outside to capture water for our sprinkler system / gardening irrigation, if it weren't for this year's 100 year rains.
Yeah, in New England I really need a dehumidifier in the basement. It's a bit damp in any case (old fieldstone) but the dehumidifier keeps it from getting really bad.
It would be cool if they could put some of this technology into commercial grade dehumidifiers even before they get put into HVAC systems. If you could run a super efficient portable dehumidifier and boost the performance of your HVAC system, it would be much faster to reduce overall energy consumption because it would be far less expensive than upgrading an entire HVAC system.
My area is currently in drought. My yard is basically dead/hibernating. Except around the waste water outlet from my heat pump. That is nice and green.
Sorry to comment on the site and not the article, but goddamn. I have an old phone and visiting news sites like wired make it as hot as if I'm playing a video game, and the page had to reload several times like it ran out of memory. I lost 15% of my battery in 2 minutes of reading.
Wired (and other news sites), what the hell are you doing to computers? Stop it. People on newer phones may not notice it, but they're still burning just as many cycles on whatever stupid bullshit you decided to add to your site.
Maybe we wouldn't need so many air conditioners if sites like yours didn't exist.
This makes me want an LLM that traces every line of code running on a site and provides a summary…
“when you scrolled the page 2 pixels just now, it triggered 500 network requests to various tracking sites. additionally, it forced redrawing the site 3 times, and consumed 400ms of GPU time.”
I’m happy to sift through a .cpuprofile and create an intelligent actionable summary of it if I’m at work and that’s the job they’re paying me to do. And very often they do pay me quite handsomely for my ability to do just that!
But if I’m not at work, I frankly don’t care enough. A single button “take trade for 1 second and send it to GPT4” is the level of effort I’m willing to freedom dedicate to these folks’ crap.
Advertising nudge from phone makers? "My phone is too slow to browse the web, I need a new one". Especially on a "tech magazine" like Wired, the ultimate purpose is to advertise tech.
I think they alluded to it in the article, but when a heat pump is cooling the inside it's generating lots of heat on the outside. They could/should/likely are using that 'waste' heat to dry out the desiccant. Seems like a great plan.
I often wonder why hot water systems aren't linked into the HVAC as well. I know you can get heat pump water heaters, but it seems like integrating it into the HVAC system would potentially allow for system scale optimizations. I would assume the cost/complexity is too much for residential systems. For that matter, refrigeration in homes falls into the same category as they are a heat pump that's dumping waste heat into your living space.
Combining refrigerator, water heater and heat pump implies the need for transferring the fluid used as refrigerant between these components. This is usually a gas that is not trivial to contain, so creating this shared pipeline increases the points of failure. Further, you now have to insulate the entire length of this system, using material to do so, and you will end up losing a certain amount of efficiency anyways in this piping system. Also, what if your need in hot water is much greater than your need to cool the house or vice versa, what is your backup system for disposing of heat or cold when not required? It’s not certain that after solving all these problems and others, that you still have a net efficiency gain.
I like to imagine a world where it's acceptable for houses to be designed around a utility room where all of these interchanges, insulation, isolation, exhaust, issues can be contained, and accessed, in a small, separate, space that is not part of the living area.
Unfortunately it's also a world where having a problem with your aircon means your fridge stops working and replacing a fridge means calling in a technician for the plumbing.
I think you could get away with two insulated reservoirs (frozen and hot water) and then use something like glycol, alcohol or water to shuttle hot and cold to your shower, under floor heating/cooling. Frozen water can be mechanically stirred (like a slushy machine) to keep it from freezing solid, allowing you to pump it through pipes. Water can also be mixed with salts or alcohol to alter it's freezing temperatures, with allow you to move cold from your freezer to the refrigerated areas (fridge, computers or living spaces). You can also use air as a working fluid. Any excess can be dumped to the outside environment with a radiator as a last resort.
Modern cars are already doing this with heat pumps to manage batteries and the cabin temperatures.
It's pretty easy to see where building technologies will go by looking at car technologies...
Apparently integrating appliances that use refrigerant piping isn’t so easy, compared to self-contained units that just need electricity. It looks like mini-split systems require professional installation.
I wonder if there is another way to connect things?
More than any of that is that a _proper_ install means you need a specific level of vacuum on the lines before refrigerant is introduced. That effects the performance of the system a lot. My friend is an HVAC nerd/wiz and has explain, in detail, the whole process for how HVAC systems function. It's really quite interesting.
One interesting thing he pointed out was that HVAC system load calculations are predicated on a max exterior temperature of something like 92 or 94 degrees (I forget the exact number). If the exterior temperature exceeds that, the system's ability to cool faster than the space heats is compromised. And if you think, oh, just oversize the system then, you'd be making a mistake as well. Over-sized systems don't run enough for proper dehumidification and most houses I've been in do not have a dedicated dehumidification loop. My friend has one in his house, but it uses dedicated vent lines and everything, so it's a sizeable investment. That's actually where things like this system start to become interesting.
there are many mini-split heat pump systems that can be installed by a homeowner without a professional installation now. An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmwZVD2KEDY
If this were a continuous commercial operation then heat from one process would definitely be used in another. That does save money. The problem is that residential use will be variable and intermittent, requiring a host of sensors and valves to turn loops on and off depending on random needs. And when say one process needs to dump heat, but that heat isn't needed elsewhere (ie the hot water tank is already hot) then equivalent backup radiators must on standby to take the load. That is all just too much control circuitry for residential devices normally controlled by just one bang-bang (on/off) control.
Where I live, few installers have specialized in heat pump water heaters, and it's still seen as a niche technology. This means the cost increase compared to a standard electric or gas water heater is high and installation issues are common. You also run into a lot of situations where the water heater is placed in conditioned space which makes any energy savings a lot more sketchy.
Adding different systems to the mix, to where we now need the HVAC guy, plumber, etc. to all set up a working system together seems like a recipe for disaster.
> You also run into a lot of situations where the water heater is placed in conditioned space which makes any energy savings a lot more sketchy.
Assuming these were the prior positions of a non heat pump system, you've gone from creating heat to transferring heat; while both radiate heat, the heat pump is much closer to net 0.
Heat pump systems in combination with underfloor heating are sort of common in new homes over here (not the norm, but common enough). The heatpump heats the floor in winter, cools it in summer. The heat is stored in a large water tank, and it can be transferred to potable water for showers and whatnot.
Best part is, you can supply heat to the tank in multiple ways, even concurrently. Think heat pumps, solar water heaters, or even a fireplace if you're so inclined.
I have seen water heat pump systems. They are meant to replace boilers for radiators or under floor heating. Then the hot water can be stored. Or go to a heat exchanger for heating and cooling with ducts. Water is much easier fluid to work with than refrigerant.
One reason don't see combined systems is that refrigerator and water heater don't move that much heat. Refrigerator is fine dumping the heat into the kitchen, and water heater pulling heat from the basement. The air inside the house turns into the working fluid.
Another trend I have seen[1]
] (US market, high performance/high energy efficiency homes) is the use of HVAC and separate, standalone dehumidifier to do the same thing - take out humidity out of the air that the AC system has to otherwise both cool and dehumidify on it own.
The framing (at least as I understood it) was more on the psychometric side - 24C@65% relatuve humidity _feels_ worse than 27C@45%RH, but the energy savings aspect is also non-trivial.
As an aside - a fairly large number of central AC systems in the US do not have a humidity censor, so they only go by the temperature set point. Upgrading to control system which does measure humidity, while energy inefficient (because AC would be used to dehumidify the air _below_ the target set point), is an option, though not as good as having a stand-alone humidity control system. Sadly, I am unaware of Nest and/or Ecobee's support for this sort of a setup. Probably not cost effective for them. :\
Another option is a variable speed condensing unit. This is what I am looking at doing next.
A dedicated central dehumidifier is nice, but I've found them to be kind of noisy, especially when installed in the attic. Its got its own compressor, so the vibrations will transfer into the structure.
> Sadly, I am unaware of Nest and/or Ecobee's support for this sort of a setup.
Same, and the worst part is that Nest already includes a hygrometer to show humidity in the app. All they need to give the user is a toggle: setpoint in regular dry bulb temperature, or setpoint in calculated wet bulb temperature (or heat index or "feels like" or whatever user-friendly calculation). Although their remote temperature sensors don't have a hygrometer, only the main unit.
> The framing (at least as I understood it) was more on the psychometric side - 24C@65% relatuve humidity _feels_ worse than 27C@45%RH
It's complicated to quantify, but in a sense 24C@65% is warmer than 27C@45%RH. Or rather, maintaining your body temperature is more difficult in the former than in the latter.
The human body produces ~100W of heat, and the primary way to get rid of it in warm weather is evaporative cooling: at below 100% relative humidity water slowly evaporates, this takes energy and thus cools down the surface the water was sitting on. We use that by coating us in sweat and letting it evaporate. This is more efficient the lower the relative humidity is.
The attempt to quantify this in a nice metric is the wet bulb temperature (what would a thermometer with a wet cloth around it show). 24C@65% is a wet bulb temp of 19.3C, 27C@45% is a wet bulb temp of 18.8C
> Sadly, I am unaware of Nest and/or Ecobee's support for this sort of a setup. Probably not cost effective for them. :\
I've got both of these. Nest has a setting for 'cool to dry', but my climate is usually not humid and hot at the same time. I don't see a similar feature on the Ecobee, but the Ecobee app is perhaps more confusing. It does send alerts when the detected humidity is above set points. Where I do have issues with humidity is in my basement; typically the basement stays around 5-10 F less than the first floor, and if the first floor is 50% relative humidity, moving the air into the basement results in a much higher relative humidity. If the a/c is running for the first floor, there's a good chance of significant condensation on the vents right after the air handler.
Right, I wasn't specofic - Ecobee will overcool with the main AC, but it does not have the 'I have a dehumidifier in my HVAC setup, go use THAT' setting.
Since this article uses that fluffy "tell a story" writing style, here's the facts in the article stripped out:
1. Air conditioning consumes 10% of global energy and 20% of energy used in buildings.
2. Demand for cooling is expected to increase significantly, with 2/3 of world households projected to have air conditioning by 2050.
3. Dehumidification accounts for over half of energy consumption in air conditioners in humid conditions.
4. New technologies are being developed to improve air conditioning efficiency:
a. AirJoule by Montana Technologies:
- Uses metal-organic framework material for dehumidification
- Claims to reduce energy for dehumidification by up to 90%
- Still in prototype and testing stages
b. Blue Frontier:
- Uses liquid desiccant for dehumidification
- Being installed in various locations in the US
c. IceBrick by Nostromo Energy:
- Energy storage system for large-scale cooling
- Can reduce annual cooling costs by 30% and associated emissions by up to 80%
- Only suitable for centralized cooling systems
d. Gradient:
- Window-based heat pumps with larger external units for better efficiency
- Currently costs $3,800, aiming to reduce to $1,000
5. Electrocaloric cooling is being researched as a potential future technology, potentially 20% more efficient than current methods.
6. Passive cooling measures (e.g., window shutters) should not be overlooked as they cost nothing to run.
7. Current non-centralized air conditioners operate at only about 20% of their theoretical maximum efficiency.
> 6. Passive cooling measures (e.g., window shutters) should not be overlooked as they cost nothing to run.
What about insulation? In my experience the insulation in most hot places is abysmal, compared to cold places. I’m not even a layman, but shouldn’t the physics work the same? Or does the air flow from AC change the equation?
I live in Florida and new-build homes are relatively well-insulated. Older stuff can be anywhere from very poor to surprisingly good (e.g. old, small concrete block housing). And yes, the idea is broadly the same, although insulation doesn't help with de-humidification.
Having watched many homes being built here in FL, I don't hold the same opinion. Homes here are, in general, still poorly built. Even something as simple as 2x6 exterior framing (for more insulation depth) is not common. Don't even get me started on the lack of modern framing techniques or tight envelopes. Another one that drives me nuts is watching them leave attic unconditioned but they run HVAC vents through that same unconditioned space. All the insulation is in the ceiling, not the roof. It's really disappointing to watch TBH. No builders want the expense when they can build it poorly and the buyers don't really know better. If you build a custom home you can get better outcomes, but the prices jump drastically. Sorry, this is a sore subject for me apparently.
A well insulated (air tight) house does make it easier to keep some humidity out with a ventilation system with an ERV (Energy/Enthalpy Recovering Ventilator). It basically has a membrane which keeps humidity on the most humid side. So it keeps indoor air dry in humid summers, and humid in dry winters.
I have one, and it helps keep my house a lot more comfortable in summer, reducing the need for a/c to maybe a couple of weeks a year.
> What about insulation?
> I’m not even a layman, but shouldn’t the physics work the same? Or does the air flow from AC change the equation?
Insulation works great in hot climates, but only when the building is also well air-sealed and air-conditioned. Otherwise, insulation alone will just make a house work like an oven after it heats up (through radiant and convective heat gain).
I hope someone takes the idea from this video and compiles it into more solid and actionable data. I would like something where I can describe my window location and the type of window and it tells me how much cooling I would gain with an awning.
Thank you for the summary! (Note: indenting text with two spaces makes it render with a monospaced font on Hacker News, see https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc )
In areas where water is not in particularly short supply, you can cool by evaporating water into the exhaust pre-heat-exchanger of an MVHR system. This then vents the warmer humid air into the outside and cools incoming air. The enthalpy diagram suggest it's quite helpful and there's a product on the market that uses exactly this approach.
It's basically half of a closed cycle heat pump, in which the hot side is an externality.
We could reduce demand for air conditioning if we designed our lives around the natural environment rather than isolating ourselves from it.
Right now we build giant boxes to live/move around in that suck up the sun's heat, then we insulate the box, then build another box to remove moisture in the box, cool the air in the box, blow it around, and then we have to power it...
....or we could live and move around in an open, shaded area, where wind can pass easily, fans blow on us to cool us (your skin is designed for cooling with wind, unlike most other animals on the planet), and cool mists can assist.
The latter is how I stay comfortable while camping in 90% humidity and 90F temperature. There are other solutions too, like staying underground during the peak of the heat, taking a dip in a pool of water, drinking cold liquids. All these and more don't require an exponential increase in energy generation, advanced engineering, or boxes designed to create an artificial environment.
> The system wouldn’t suit a single house, as it only works with these large centralized cooling installations. However, it can be bolted to a variety of chiller plants—it doesn’t really matter what circulating fluid they use, for example, Ben Nun says
We have district heating in New York [1]. Fascinating to think of district cooling, too.
Air conditioning should be applied only the to a bubble of cubic space surrounding the people in a given room as well as any temperature-sensitive goods like medicines, perishables, etc. We ought to develop tech to facilitate this, for example a mosquito net style insulating cocoon to enclose your bed at night that conditions the air inside of it but leaves the rest of the room warm.
Honestly it could be hardly used in practice. The frontier of cooling is:
- living in MODERN, so air-tight, well insulated buildings, designed to get the Sun when needed in winter, but not get it in summer with simple design choices etc;
-living in places where nights are fresh and having p.v. to cool with no energy consumption from grid during the day.
Now the above points are a bit bold but try reasoning why we live where we live. In the past places where circadian thermal delta was/is lower was very good places because it was less hot than now and there was no cheap heating. Similarly living in some places very deep in a valley was nice because floods was a thing anyway, but having clean water was invaluable and homes back then have had much less things who can be damaged by floods. Climate have change but technology, human living is changed much more. In the present world many inhabited parts of the world that back than was nice places, today they are not and others back than not so nice today are nice places.
In the past being many in a single places means:
- being able to defend against enemies
- having access to all professions and services
- having trade and learning opportunities
- be more exposed to illness, BUT being able to get help much easier
now? It means that
- 9/11 alike attacks or simple drone attacks are much more easy and deadly
- you get more dysfunctional services because we are too dense for them in too many place (as an example packages delivery in large condo complex vs single family homes)
- be more exposed to illness, with sometimes even LESS chances of a quick aid
- being mostly limited by nearby activities instead of having plenty of space for build a new one and remote work
Try to weight this, in terms of opportunities, disasters and who win vs who loose.
75 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadNo need to by hyper-efficient when energy is almost free.
Energy is only free at times when we don't actually need it.
Installed cost, I mean. Assume, like in most houses, none of the supporting electrical work has been done for solar already.
Where’s the dirt cheap home solar?
https://youtu.be/hc_HcT4pIOE?si=0Nn1HwY-rpvhny9H&t=922
Edit to add: just in case, you should never use water out of a dehumidifier for anything but grey water use cases unless you sanitize and purify it - it can make you very sick!
So Florida is known as the sunshine state, but it's also the rainy state. It rains 2.5x more by inches than it does in Rainy Seattle.
Wired (and other news sites), what the hell are you doing to computers? Stop it. People on newer phones may not notice it, but they're still burning just as many cycles on whatever stupid bullshit you decided to add to your site.
Maybe we wouldn't need so many air conditioners if sites like yours didn't exist.
“when you scrolled the page 2 pixels just now, it triggered 500 network requests to various tracking sites. additionally, it forced redrawing the site 3 times, and consumed 400ms of GPU time.”
But if I’m not at work, I frankly don’t care enough. A single button “take trade for 1 second and send it to GPT4” is the level of effort I’m willing to freedom dedicate to these folks’ crap.
I often wonder why hot water systems aren't linked into the HVAC as well. I know you can get heat pump water heaters, but it seems like integrating it into the HVAC system would potentially allow for system scale optimizations. I would assume the cost/complexity is too much for residential systems. For that matter, refrigeration in homes falls into the same category as they are a heat pump that's dumping waste heat into your living space.
Modern cars are already doing this with heat pumps to manage batteries and the cabin temperatures.
It's pretty easy to see where building technologies will go by looking at car technologies...
I wonder if there is another way to connect things?
One interesting thing he pointed out was that HVAC system load calculations are predicated on a max exterior temperature of something like 92 or 94 degrees (I forget the exact number). If the exterior temperature exceeds that, the system's ability to cool faster than the space heats is compromised. And if you think, oh, just oversize the system then, you'd be making a mistake as well. Over-sized systems don't run enough for proper dehumidification and most houses I've been in do not have a dedicated dehumidification loop. My friend has one in his house, but it uses dedicated vent lines and everything, so it's a sizeable investment. That's actually where things like this system start to become interesting.
Adding different systems to the mix, to where we now need the HVAC guy, plumber, etc. to all set up a working system together seems like a recipe for disaster.
Assuming these were the prior positions of a non heat pump system, you've gone from creating heat to transferring heat; while both radiate heat, the heat pump is much closer to net 0.
Best part is, you can supply heat to the tank in multiple ways, even concurrently. Think heat pumps, solar water heaters, or even a fireplace if you're so inclined.
One reason don't see combined systems is that refrigerator and water heater don't move that much heat. Refrigerator is fine dumping the heat into the kitchen, and water heater pulling heat from the basement. The air inside the house turns into the working fluid.
The framing (at least as I understood it) was more on the psychometric side - 24C@65% relatuve humidity _feels_ worse than 27C@45%RH, but the energy savings aspect is also non-trivial.
As an aside - a fairly large number of central AC systems in the US do not have a humidity censor, so they only go by the temperature set point. Upgrading to control system which does measure humidity, while energy inefficient (because AC would be used to dehumidify the air _below_ the target set point), is an option, though not as good as having a stand-alone humidity control system. Sadly, I am unaware of Nest and/or Ecobee's support for this sort of a setup. Probably not cost effective for them. :\
[1] https://youtu.be/rWWLW4nLNBI?si=Ud1jk3x58H6pnMci
A dedicated central dehumidifier is nice, but I've found them to be kind of noisy, especially when installed in the attic. Its got its own compressor, so the vibrations will transfer into the structure.
Same, and the worst part is that Nest already includes a hygrometer to show humidity in the app. All they need to give the user is a toggle: setpoint in regular dry bulb temperature, or setpoint in calculated wet bulb temperature (or heat index or "feels like" or whatever user-friendly calculation). Although their remote temperature sensors don't have a hygrometer, only the main unit.
It's complicated to quantify, but in a sense 24C@65% is warmer than 27C@45%RH. Or rather, maintaining your body temperature is more difficult in the former than in the latter.
The human body produces ~100W of heat, and the primary way to get rid of it in warm weather is evaporative cooling: at below 100% relative humidity water slowly evaporates, this takes energy and thus cools down the surface the water was sitting on. We use that by coating us in sweat and letting it evaporate. This is more efficient the lower the relative humidity is.
The attempt to quantify this in a nice metric is the wet bulb temperature (what would a thermometer with a wet cloth around it show). 24C@65% is a wet bulb temp of 19.3C, 27C@45% is a wet bulb temp of 18.8C
I've got both of these. Nest has a setting for 'cool to dry', but my climate is usually not humid and hot at the same time. I don't see a similar feature on the Ecobee, but the Ecobee app is perhaps more confusing. It does send alerts when the detected humidity is above set points. Where I do have issues with humidity is in my basement; typically the basement stays around 5-10 F less than the first floor, and if the first floor is 50% relative humidity, moving the air into the basement results in a much higher relative humidity. If the a/c is running for the first floor, there's a good chance of significant condensation on the vents right after the air handler.
Ecobee has a setting to enable this: https://support.ecobee.com/s/articles/How-to-use-AC-Overcool...
They also have a setting to adjust the temperature for humidity: https://support.ecobee.com/s/articles/Adjust-the-Temperature...
1. Air conditioning consumes 10% of global energy and 20% of energy used in buildings.
2. Demand for cooling is expected to increase significantly, with 2/3 of world households projected to have air conditioning by 2050.
3. Dehumidification accounts for over half of energy consumption in air conditioners in humid conditions.
4. New technologies are being developed to improve air conditioning efficiency:
5. Electrocaloric cooling is being researched as a potential future technology, potentially 20% more efficient than current methods.6. Passive cooling measures (e.g., window shutters) should not be overlooked as they cost nothing to run.
7. Current non-centralized air conditioners operate at only about 20% of their theoretical maximum efficiency.
What about insulation? In my experience the insulation in most hot places is abysmal, compared to cold places. I’m not even a layman, but shouldn’t the physics work the same? Or does the air flow from AC change the equation?
I have one, and it helps keep my house a lot more comfortable in summer, reducing the need for a/c to maybe a couple of weeks a year.
Insulation works great in hot climates, but only when the building is also well air-sealed and air-conditioned. Otherwise, insulation alone will just make a house work like an oven after it heats up (through radiant and convective heat gain).
Technology Connections just did a video on awnings. I'm not quite as puppy eyed about them as TC, but they are pretty darn effective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhbDfi7Ee7k
MOFs are super interesting!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal%E2%80%93organic_framewor...
they are one of the most complex non-biological structures I know of
It's basically half of a closed cycle heat pump, in which the hot side is an externality.
Right now we build giant boxes to live/move around in that suck up the sun's heat, then we insulate the box, then build another box to remove moisture in the box, cool the air in the box, blow it around, and then we have to power it...
....or we could live and move around in an open, shaded area, where wind can pass easily, fans blow on us to cool us (your skin is designed for cooling with wind, unlike most other animals on the planet), and cool mists can assist.
The latter is how I stay comfortable while camping in 90% humidity and 90F temperature. There are other solutions too, like staying underground during the peak of the heat, taking a dip in a pool of water, drinking cold liquids. All these and more don't require an exponential increase in energy generation, advanced engineering, or boxes designed to create an artificial environment.
We have district heating in New York [1]. Fascinating to think of district cooling, too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
- living in MODERN, so air-tight, well insulated buildings, designed to get the Sun when needed in winter, but not get it in summer with simple design choices etc;
-living in places where nights are fresh and having p.v. to cool with no energy consumption from grid during the day.
Now the above points are a bit bold but try reasoning why we live where we live. In the past places where circadian thermal delta was/is lower was very good places because it was less hot than now and there was no cheap heating. Similarly living in some places very deep in a valley was nice because floods was a thing anyway, but having clean water was invaluable and homes back then have had much less things who can be damaged by floods. Climate have change but technology, human living is changed much more. In the present world many inhabited parts of the world that back than was nice places, today they are not and others back than not so nice today are nice places.
In the past being many in a single places means:
- being able to defend against enemies
- having access to all professions and services
- having trade and learning opportunities
- be more exposed to illness, BUT being able to get help much easier
now? It means that
- 9/11 alike attacks or simple drone attacks are much more easy and deadly
- you get more dysfunctional services because we are too dense for them in too many place (as an example packages delivery in large condo complex vs single family homes)
- be more exposed to illness, with sometimes even LESS chances of a quick aid
- being mostly limited by nearby activities instead of having plenty of space for build a new one and remote work
Try to weight this, in terms of opportunities, disasters and who win vs who loose.