> Several countries require AC installation to be approved by the equivalent of a homeowners association or impose noise ordinances that increase compliance costs and paperwork.
This is not unique to ACs. Anything on the outside of a building requires your co-owners to agree.
https://www.headingtonshark.com/Home/About ("Hello. I'm Magnus Hanson-Heine, the home-owner of the Headington Shark House. The Shark House, formally titled Untitled 1986, consists of a 25ft-long fibreglass and steel shark crashing through the roof of an otherwise ordinary house on a quiet residential street in suburban Oxford...")
There are noise conditions and a few scenarios that will need planning permission (facing a public highway is one) but generally pretty liberal.
The shark scenario is more interesting, and was I'd say was largely allowed to stay because it was an art installation. They couldn't have built an extension of the same proportions without planning permission.
That's where the image of AC in general matters. It needs to be seen as a life saving tech just like heating, not a luxury item for rich people.
If it was just a matter of red tape it would be fine, but in France people would fight you on AC because it's ugly/noisy/warms up the street.
So you can get it rejected by people who live in a flat where heat is not as much of a problem as your (ground floor vs higher floor, window orientation) or by landlords who don't even live in the building.
We have those stupid regulations in Finland about how the outside of our apartments buildings should look - meaning you cannot put the condenser visibly on the outside of the building. I've heard stories of residents being scalded for putting flowers on their balcony railings that face outwards as it ruins the "look". Given almost all apartment buildings are built consistently between every floor they could ensure consistent placement of condensers across all floors and it wouldn't even look that bad.
Sometimes it's not about the fence, it's about exerting power. Put people in charge of the decision that shouldn't be there, and you're in world of pain.
Doesn't matter what it looks like, problem is it changes the facade. For that you need to submit some paperwork and get it approved.
You can actually install a heat pump in most apartment buildings, as long as it's on the balcony and not visible from the street (=below waist-level). Main reason you wouldn't, is condensate output which has to be piped indoors or into a heated drain during the winter. Or you just pipe it into your balcony's rainwater drain and accept that you can't use the heatpump below 0C.
Obviously, people thought about this, and there are lots of fence designs that admit plenty of airflow and lots of products ready-made for this already.
Service technicians hate fences unless they are easy to remove during a service call. Honestly, esthetics is not as much concerning as the noise from compressor and condenser fan. I stayed in an AirBnb, where the outdoor unit next to the bed room, and I couldn't sleep.
> We have those stupid regulations in Finland about how the outside of our apartments buildings should look - meaning you cannot put the condenser visibly on the outside of the building.
Same for Germany, at least in many places. And if your building gets reclassified as being under Denkmalschutz (cultural heritage management) you've won in the Lottery of Pain.
While I hear you, I think AC is better centralized for the building, along with heat and water.
Yes, there are numerous reasons why this is harder to do than just doing it ad-hoc per apartment, but if we’re to see it as infrastructure, it should receive the same level of consideration as other utilities.
The problem with shared is the issue of shared cost. How do you determine how much a user consumes?
There is also the issue of upgrading the shared infrastructure. Because of the size it's a lot more expensive to replace, so that is postponed for much longer because now everybody needs to pitch in.
You can install one on the balcony below the railing level.
The housing company is responsible for the exterior surfaces and thus also responsible for whatever happens to fall on bystanders when it will inevitably happen.
AC installers are also notoriously bad at following placement guidelines.
I've had one placed like this in the balcony of a XVth century palazzo turned museum plus hotel, straight in the historical heart of Verona. If they can do it, everybody can do it as well.
You say stupid, but I actually would find it sad to see beautiful buildings that are in many cases hundreds of years old defaced with loads of small condensers bolted on to the face.
That doesn't mean they shouldn't have A/C but rather all flats use one system with a large roof condenser, or where that is not possible district cooling or ground source.
I'm not talking about historic buildings that are hundreds of years old. I live in Finland - we don't have many of these. Almost all apartments are built after the 60s outside the downtown and look like concrete boxes.
I think you misunderstand what isolation does. It will also keep the heat out. Having window awnings to block sunlight from directly warming up the room will go a long way.
The problem is if you can't get the home cooled off, then heat that does build up can't escape.
In western Canada until recently we got away with very good insulation coupled with opening windows at night as daytime-vs-nighttime temperatures could swing as much as 15C.
But as nighttime temperatures increase, or in more humid climates where the temperature doesn't drop enough, that's no longer effective.
The net result is the home just gets hot and stays hot.
if you have balcony you could hide multisplit unit under railing
if you don't want permanent installation there are not basically mobile split units like Midea Portasplit, it's basically same thing you would install on the wall, but mobile on the wheels (personally I have regular AC (Toshiba) and my multisplit unit is on the flat roof invisible from the street, this year neighbor floor below me installed his unit on the roof as well, we are the only 2 apartments in two units with 40 apartments in total with AC, so much for Prague AC statistics, though honestly even under the roof in 35C+ temperatures it was not that bad prior turning on the AC)
I don't necessarily disagree, but I am wondering what luxury will next become a necessity if we keep increasing our energy usage in order to get both more luxuries and necessities?
On the bright side, I suppose one mitigating factor is that renewable energy makes it less harmful to use energy to power A/C usage.
>But forgoing air conditioning is a refusal to move on from a lethally hot past.
Gee, I wonder if this global warming thing wasn't a mistake to let happen...
If that author is right, then we can and should punish the people responsible for global warming? Because that includes a lot of her colleagues at Cato and WaPo. The same who were against the same carbon taxes that would be useful to reduce and mitigate the global warming that kills...
We can start with people who got paid to make sure no action was taken against global warming - such as everyone working at CATO, like the author of this article...
It is called a rhetorical question. You already know the answer.
And if you don't already know it, just wonder why AC isn't widespread in Europe, why nuclear plants but decades ago have to stop due to the lack of water and why every single article talks about an "exceptional" heat wave. Do you really need me to hold you hand there?
Cooling technologies are a necessity and air conditioning is one of many possible options.
Europe north of France is substantially cooler than much of the US, even on the hottest days. Many homes could get by on ceiling fans, but they are very uncommon here.
A couple of years ago that would have been correct, but circumstances have changed.
We've had a series of heat waves this summer, and temperatures have gotten very high inside. Much depends on the location of course, and the type of building, and stuff like that, but the fact is that in Belgium alone thousands of people have died because of the heat. Thousands of people that would still be with us if they would have had adequate cooling.
When it's close to 40 °C in your home, a ceiling fan is not going to make a meaningful difference.
And we need to keep in mind that summers are in all likelihood going to get hotter and hotter.
Forced air cooling require air to be colder than the heatsink surface and evaporative cooling require relative humidity to be less than 100%.
I don't know how bad the situation in Europe is, but we're already at point where there are times and places on Earth where one can construct a primal instinctive understanding of that by simply walking out of an air conditioned room(to which you SHOULD return within half an hour and MUST within an hour). "Just get fans bro" is tone deaf.
I mean, those places didn't have air conditioning 50-100 years ago and did fine, now air conditioning is life saving devices there. Global warming/climate change is real.
The WHO guide others are posting says fans only work under 40C, but that's the absolute maximum. There's no other option than resorting to devices based on refrigeration cycle when people are already dying("estimated through excess mortality" or however you dress it up), beyond being useless(human cognitive performance significantly degrade at above 28C).
The upper bound of 40C quoted in other comments is also just absolute maximum temperature - it's just saying that there's no way fans do anything if temperature of air and body are actually equal. The practical upper bound is lower than that(humidity and metabolism dependent, I guess).
yeah, I honestly dont understand why every apartment doesnt have ceiling fan, it's almost zero investment like 40-60EUR and it can be combined with light, so you don't even need any new power line
personally I tried one summer back here in Europe without AC just with ceiling fans in each room and gave up and installed AC next year, that was like 10 years ago, can't imagine just ceiling fans in these 35-40C heatwaves, you will be just moving hot air since building can't cool down even in night
I mean it's mostly about energy efficiency, a well insulated house is as easy to cool in summer as it is to heat in winter. Most heat pumps can also cool and new construction in most European countries like Germany is equipped with floor heating and central ventilation which in summer allows you to run around 18 degree Celsius hot water through the system to cool it, that yields around 20-40 Watt of cooling power per square meter, and that's often sufficient to keep things chilly. Mind you not American style 18 degree Celsius kind of chilly, but 20-25 degrees easily, which I think is quite nice. The bonus of this system is that it's mostly "radiative" cooling as the cold surface acts as an absorber of infrared radiation, I find it much more pleasant than having cold air blown into your face.
We equipped our founding era building with wall heating and will test out the heatpump based cooling next summer, if it's not enough I would consider installing a small AC unit, that's super easy as well.
Don't know what the article wants to say, there's no ban on AC anywhere in Europe and small units are quite affordable, you can get a single split unit from Mitsubishi for 500 € from Italy. The only nuisance is that installation is heavily regulated in Germany so they rip you off with insane cost. That's definitely a thing that needs to change in my opinion.
> HumanProgress.org is a project of the Cato Institute with major support from the John Templeton Foundation and the Searle Freedom Trust [1]
> The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. [2]
It's nothing more than US libertarian think tank trying to influence EU policy... Perhaps in an effort to push more anti climate change agenda/discourse in US (but that might be just my projection).
okay, sure. I only removed it because I know that questioning the mass hysteria of that brief era gets you flagged.
>the RKI estimated roughly 2,600–4,900 heat-related deaths annually in 2022–2025
>Germany reported about 2,800 COVID-19-associated deaths in the 2024/25 season, which covers most of the 2025 winter and spring.
so yes, taking Germany as the example, the world-ending plague now kills fewer boomers per year than summer does, despite it being over 4 years since anyone wore face condoms or gave a shit about bi-weekly boosters.
aboriginal Europeans' TFR is about 1.2 and falling. even if did remain that high (it won't), 750M will become <100M in 100 years and <10M in 200 years.
so I don't think it makes sense a Hans from Hamburg with 0 future descendants to self-flagellate over his carbon footprint. The Abdul from Mogadishu may emit less CO2 over his own lifetime, but each of his 5 children will have 5 children, and no one will scold him for it.
(I would use something other than "Abdul from Mogadishu" as the counterpart, but the only remotely European people not going extinct are some subgroups of Israeli Jews.)
not a single European country has the TFR anywhere near 2. with the median age now reaching >=40, the TFR of 1.0-1.5 means rapid and irreversible decline. is this news to you?
yes, yes, very virtuous of you, now back to my point: why should Hans give a flying fuck about climate change if he will have no descendants to suffer from it?
it's a throwaway. it's 70 day old because two or three controversial comments in a row get accounts without 100000000 karma ratelimited to one comment per infinity. when it happens I make another. my squeaky clean main account is older than yours.
It's a throwaway troll account. I know of three other accounts of the same user. The issue is not a couple of slightly downvoted comments, it's persistent trolling.
The ability to create new accounts so easily and be a nuisance is my least favourite "feature" of HN.
Sweden has a 'district cooling' as well as district heating. 2 completely different systems ofcourse. The district cooling are a centralized way of providing cold air/liquid to building and facilities across the city. And they can do so also by taking waste heat from manufacturing etc and use the energy to procude cold. Pretty neat idea IMO, and something that ideally would be in priority instead of letting each building have their own AC and create a lot of noise.
The problem with monopolies is that they can hike prices at will. This has certainly happened with district heating in Sweden. You can't do that with AC and solar.
I'm not convinced by the author's point that ACs do not impose a burden on the electrical grid. They write that ACs have gotten more efficient, which may be true, but that's the same Windows developers have been saying over years and yet boot times and hardware requirements have gone way up. One million efficient units still require more energy than no units. And while I definitely believe that European hospitals and retirement homes sadly need ACs now (thanks global warming), I'm not sure everyone and their dog needs one.
I also have reservations about why an American libertarian think tank writes about what Europeans should do, but that's probably on me.
> I also have reservations about why an American libertarian think tank writes about what Europeans should do, but that's probably on me.
My thoughts exactly, except in my mind it's pretty clear that it's about influencing the climate change discourse... The less people are bothered by the rising temperatures, the more they will acquiesce to environmentally unfriendly policy.
European citizens should have obstacles put into their path to access one of the great life-enhancing technologies of the last century … so they will vote for the “right” policies as implemented by the politicians setting up those obstacles?
I'm still brothered by climate change every time i get out of my apartment. I still don't want to feel miserable during heatwave. This argument is utter nonsense considering most of Europe has summer clean electric overcapacity. It's even more nonsensical in case of hvacs because it leads to pollution reduction by replacing gas heating
The reason why they aren't much of a problem for the grid is solar. Right now we already have the issue, that in some areas we're throwing away the majority of the produced electricity. Very common in e.g. southern germany.
Conveniently, cooling is especially needed when the energy production from solar is at its maximum.
I've been part of projects building 20-40 MW solar installations in southern germany and on average we throw away >50% of what we generate.
There is SO MUCH SOLAR now, we don't know what to do with all the energy.
>while I definitely believe that European hospitals and retirement homes sadly need ACs now (thanks global warming), I'm not sure everyone and their dog needs one.
If a 10-day heat wave cuts work productivity by 10% (which is optimistic IMO, it's probably worse in countries where people aren't used to it), that's equivalent to a 1-day general strike. If the workers actually managed to pull off a general strike in modern times, you can be sure the state wouldn't be happy with business as usual.
Most of the grid is built for winter. Summer has huge overcapacity. That's also why France exported every single day and hour this summer despite all the stories of shut down nuclear plants
Europe had tens of thousands of excess deaths from heatwaves this year. It's not about american think tank but basic will to avoid suffering
A total ban is nonsensical. If you’re concerned about noise regulate the sound level. If you’re concerned about energy use, tax it and put the money raised into a solar subsidy. But the idea you can have a heat pump and can’t have an AC is absurd because a heat pump literally is an AC flipped around.
Domestic connections in the UK are built with an average peak consumption of about 1.5 to 2kW, you can draw ten times that, but its unlikely every house will do that at the same time, so it's just like a contention ratio on a network.
Now imagine everyone charges their car, even if it's only for an hour, but when they get home at 7pm, same time as putting on the kettle and the oven, that's way higher than the substation can provide.
One study put a fully electric car/heatpump/cooking about 4 times the peak demand of an ice/gas heating house, even if total usage is only twice as much, and total energy use is far less than with ICE/gas. Throw in solar and it reduces the total power drawn from the grid, but not the peak amount. Drawing 20kW for one hour is far more expensive to service than drawing 1kW for 24 hours, but uses less energy.
Easily solved with various time-of-use pricing schemes. Have people put their cars on a timer to charge in the middle of the night, or during the day in countries with solar. I already have this for my hot water heating - the water heater only runs during solar hours when there is a cheaper rate.
> Drawing 20kW for one hour
Why would you fast charge if your car is going to be parked at home overnight anyway
Charging one car at 7kW, put the oven on, jump in the electric shower, and you're there before the heat pump even kicks in.
20kW is the maximum input to a typical UK home (80A or 100A breaker). You can draw that fairly easily.
But a street of 100 houses is not drawing 20kW to each house at the same time, or 2MW to the street. Standard models put it around 200kW. The substation can be overspecced to 300kW and there's no problem.
Convert everyone to electric and that substation needs to be upped far higher.
And no fast charger i've ever used had a gas generator next to it. Even if it were true (and in the EU it is definitely not) DC fast charging is only small percentage of EV charging.
https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/2035921843757216158?s=20 This is just one example. EVgo and many other very large charging networks use generators also. Even if you charge at home or anywhere else which you don't see the generator, that electricity has to be made from using coal gas or other stuff, renewables are not a big share in most of them. Those cables transferring electricity loses a lot of energy and gives off lots of heat but you won't see that.
Rare exceptions exist (the other is chargers out in the middle of nowhere, or during construction that impacts the grid connection), if they all used gas generators that cost for a fast charge would be 4x what it is, it's obvious it's not normal.
> that electricity has to be made from using coal gas or other stuff, renewables are not a big share in most of them
If we're talking about Europe as this thread was, fossil fuels are 35% of the grid and dwindling (it was over 50% 20 years ago). Coal is only 11%.
> Those cables transferring electricity loses a lot of energy and gives off lots of heat but you won't see that
Transmission losses are 5%. Transporting oil (be it by ship, truck or pipeline) isn't free either.
Totally understand thanks for the explanation. still it doesnt make sense and answer why are they so strict about using cooling devices. If theyre using renewables and stuff it only makes sense cooling would be more okay that using that same energy to heat houses, yet cooling is just political and restricted. Im in US and i could care less it just reading comments even on here how hard can be installing AC and stuff really doesn't make sense.
I tend to stay away from topics like this which generalize and basically tell a whole continent they are living their lives "wrongly".
But I have to say, AC is not "banned" anywhere in Europe, apart from certain cantons of Switzerland. In Germany you have a right to AC actually, if your community votes to "veto" the installation a court can overturn that.
To be fair, the article doesn't say that AC is banned - it mostly focuses on the HOA-style local ordinances and permits that discourage people from using AC.
> But I have to say, AC is not "banned" anywhere in Europe
Exactly, the whole premise of the article is a bit of a strawman. In fact, where I live, the demand for AC installation is so high that you have to wait months for a company to install a unit for you.
These extreme heat waves are a fairly new phenomenon, summers in central Europe just didn't use to get so hot for such a long stretch of time even a few decades ago. Now that they've become the way they are, people are doing what? Correct, installing AC units. Imagine that.
But let's not forget that energy is also on average a lot more expensive in Europe than in the US. The cost plus environmental concerns, which seem to fair less high in the public conscience on the other side of the Atlantic, have also been reasons why people were not keen on AC units in the past.
> But let's not forget that energy is also on average a lot more expensive in Europe than in the US. The cost plus environmental concerns, which seem to fair less high in the public conscience on the other side of the Atlantic, have also been reasons why people were not keen on AC units in the past.
The price of energy in Europe is largely determined by taxes and policy costs. Gas is mostly unencumbered. Electricity could be as well. It's a political choice to make electricity expensive.
Furthermore, given that many Europeans couldn't care less about the negative externalities of gas heating, it's very hard to argue that this is a major concern for AC, especially when AC is already mainstream in cars.
Traditionally, for heating your house, you had the choice between coal, oil, and gas. Electric heating wasn't a widespread alternative, esp. because of the price of electricity. Even today, heat pumps consume a fair amount of electricity. Solar panels can offset the cost but in many parts of Europe, the panels are not producing enough power in the winter, which is when you naturally want to run a heater.
And regarding ACs in cars: you will certainly agree that cooling the inside of a car vs. the inside of a whole house differ by orders of magnitude regarding the energy required.
It’s not banned, but getting permission to install the outside unit is essentially “hard” in some parts of Europe.
In the UK, if you own a house, you generally have permitted development rights to install one, subject to some fairly common-sense rules. If you live in a flat, though, it’s a very different story: you will need planning permission *as well as* freeholder consent, and the process generally involves engineering/structural/architect drawings and freehold-consent paperwork. The freeholder can also charge you their legal and administration costs, even if they ultimately reject the application. Essentially it's >5K of paperwork which might be wasted if it's rejected even just to install a single 5KW split.
So in the hottest parts of London and other major cities, where a large proportion of people live in flats, installing AC can be very difficult in practice. In the cooler commuter towns, where houses are much more common, it’s considerably easier.
Why can't they build it into new flat blocks/houses? Nothing outright prevents it but everyone does their best to discourage it. The London Plan, for example, uses a “cooling hierarchy” which 'seeks to reduce any potential overheating and also the need to cool a building through active cooling measures' so good luck getting planning for it.
Here in Norway AC is not the standard in hotel rooms. For 80% of the year, that's OK - but it can become pretty uncomfortable if you're booking anytime between mid-June and mid-August.
The standard here are heat pumps, at least for residential housing. It is really only a problem if you live in blocks or apartment buildings that are housing associations, with strict rules regarding how such heat pumps should be installed.
With that said, for my travel to Europe - especially down south, AC in the hotel room is an absolute necessity. A couple of years ago we ended up in a completely booked hotel in Italy (mid July), where the AC in our room was busted - it was beyond miserable. Ended up changing hotels after one night.
They think global warming is a minor threat that requires minimal to no changes in regulations, but heat waves (that, according to her, have always been the same every year) are a massive threat to the public and requires immediate changes in regulation.
Because weather engineering is experimentation with potentially huge unintended consequences both for the people in the relevant region as well as people in neighbouring regions and potentially even further.
How would you feel if your neighbour started doing something that was good for them but disastrous for you? Or something with good intentions that turned out to just be a huge mistake causing billions in damages, maybe even lives lost?
Weather engineering is extremely risky, we can barely predict the weather a few hours in advance. We have no idea what kind of havoc we might cause trying to do it on a large scale.
In our London apartment leasehold, we have a water-sourced air conditioning unit. No external condenser required, it instead dumps the heat into the waste water. It has been incredibly helpful during this heat wave as someone who really struggles in the heat and works from home.
It's not ideal during a drought though to be using water like that, it would be nice if we had a grey water tank system so we didn't have to waste drinking water. It doesn't seem possible to install a grey water tank like that in our apartment though. Given our apartment already has district heating, there's not a super strong reason why it couldn't have district cooling as well, but the regulations are not in our favour here.
We installed it all without planning permission, although it still might require permission from the freeholder depending on the rules regarding Service Media alterations (as it requires new plumbing for our mains water).
The AC propaganda coming from the US this year is really strange and out of proportion. About ten times as many people die from the cold in Europe as die from the heat.
This is not propaganda what a nonsense. The fact that more ppl die from cold is not an argument against using ACs. It's an argument to have hvacs to get proper electrified cooling and heating
But it is such a strange, superficial flood of propaganda; preaching is perhaps a better word. The main concern remains heat retention and that's what buildings will remain optimized for.
My house has 65 cm / 2 ft stone walls, which makes the normal temperature changes throughout the year very gradual because of the enormous thermal mass of the walls. But once the walls heat up during prolonged heatwaves (which are becoming more because of climate change), AC becomes remarkably ineffective at cooling because the walls will continue radiating heat into the rooms.
I agree with this, there does seem to be a volume and tone about AC that seems inauthentic (in general, not specifically on this site)
Yes, AC is harder in old building with solid walls as is common in UK & Europe.
We have a portable AC unit since March this year, and are very glad of it. It doesn't solve everything but it helped us through the worst of the heat.
All of that is nuance, and nuance is notoriously ineffective when replying to propaganda that relies on black and white thinking, volume and on changing the subject to something related, emotive but not as consequential.
The truth is that until recently AC was not needed in the mild climates of much of the continent and it is already present everywhere in the South and East. Regulation and affordability is part of the story, but its far from the primary factor for most people.
Its funny how its mostly US-based libertarian types concerned about AC in Europe. There are plenty of things Europe over-regulates, but this is not it.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 26.0 ms ] threadThis is not unique to ACs. Anything on the outside of a building requires your co-owners to agree.
https://www.headingtonshark.com/Home/About ("Hello. I'm Magnus Hanson-Heine, the home-owner of the Headington Shark House. The Shark House, formally titled Untitled 1986, consists of a 25ft-long fibreglass and steel shark crashing through the roof of an otherwise ordinary house on a quiet residential street in suburban Oxford...")
The shark scenario is more interesting, and was I'd say was largely allowed to stay because it was an art installation. They couldn't have built an extension of the same proportions without planning permission.
If it was just a matter of red tape it would be fine, but in France people would fight you on AC because it's ugly/noisy/warms up the street.
So you can get it rejected by people who live in a flat where heat is not as much of a problem as your (ground floor vs higher floor, window orientation) or by landlords who don't even live in the building.
You can actually install a heat pump in most apartment buildings, as long as it's on the balcony and not visible from the street (=below waist-level). Main reason you wouldn't, is condensate output which has to be piped indoors or into a heated drain during the winter. Or you just pipe it into your balcony's rainwater drain and accept that you can't use the heatpump below 0C.
Same for Germany, at least in many places. And if your building gets reclassified as being under Denkmalschutz (cultural heritage management) you've won in the Lottery of Pain.
Yes, there are numerous reasons why this is harder to do than just doing it ad-hoc per apartment, but if we’re to see it as infrastructure, it should receive the same level of consideration as other utilities.
There is also the issue of upgrading the shared infrastructure. Because of the size it's a lot more expensive to replace, so that is postponed for much longer because now everybody needs to pitch in.
You can install one on the balcony below the railing level.
The housing company is responsible for the exterior surfaces and thus also responsible for whatever happens to fall on bystanders when it will inevitably happen.
AC installers are also notoriously bad at following placement guidelines.
That doesn't mean they shouldn't have A/C but rather all flats use one system with a large roof condenser, or where that is not possible district cooling or ground source.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/bMYANpDU2AGDKVQN7
The problem is if you can't get the home cooled off, then heat that does build up can't escape.
In western Canada until recently we got away with very good insulation coupled with opening windows at night as daytime-vs-nighttime temperatures could swing as much as 15C.
But as nighttime temperatures increase, or in more humid climates where the temperature doesn't drop enough, that's no longer effective.
The net result is the home just gets hot and stays hot.
In medieval times, not after, I hope.
if you don't want permanent installation there are not basically mobile split units like Midea Portasplit, it's basically same thing you would install on the wall, but mobile on the wheels (personally I have regular AC (Toshiba) and my multisplit unit is on the flat roof invisible from the street, this year neighbor floor below me installed his unit on the roof as well, we are the only 2 apartments in two units with 40 apartments in total with AC, so much for Prague AC statistics, though honestly even under the roof in 35C+ temperatures it was not that bad prior turning on the AC)
We're up to more than 15,000: https://www.rki.de/DE/Themen/Gesundheit-und-Gesellschaft/Ges...
On the bright side, I suppose one mitigating factor is that renewable energy makes it less harmful to use energy to power A/C usage.
>But forgoing air conditioning is a refusal to move on from a lethally hot past.
Gee, I wonder if this global warming thing wasn't a mistake to let happen...
If that author is right, then we can and should punish the people responsible for global warming? Because that includes a lot of her colleagues at Cato and WaPo. The same who were against the same carbon taxes that would be useful to reduce and mitigate the global warming that kills...
So every adult human and corporation?
Are you considering answering this question? Was it the case fifty years ago? Did anything change?
And if you don't already know it, just wonder why AC isn't widespread in Europe, why nuclear plants but decades ago have to stop due to the lack of water and why every single article talks about an "exceptional" heat wave. Do you really need me to hold you hand there?
Europe north of France is substantially cooler than much of the US, even on the hottest days. Many homes could get by on ceiling fans, but they are very uncommon here.
Tell me you're German without telling me you're German
We've had a series of heat waves this summer, and temperatures have gotten very high inside. Much depends on the location of course, and the type of building, and stuff like that, but the fact is that in Belgium alone thousands of people have died because of the heat. Thousands of people that would still be with us if they would have had adequate cooling.
When it's close to 40 °C in your home, a ceiling fan is not going to make a meaningful difference.
And we need to keep in mind that summers are in all likelihood going to get hotter and hotter.
Hottest the hottest south facing room in my house got in the UK this year was 31.8C on the 13th August.
The loft got upto 43C, but that's what insulation is for.
That said, you're right, things are changing. I'm looking at getting AC installed this winter (no way I was paying summer prices).
> Use electric fans only when temperatures are below 40˚C / 104˚F. In temperatures above 40˚C / 104˚F, fans will heat the body.
- https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...
I don't know how bad the situation in Europe is, but we're already at point where there are times and places on Earth where one can construct a primal instinctive understanding of that by simply walking out of an air conditioned room(to which you SHOULD return within half an hour and MUST within an hour). "Just get fans bro" is tone deaf.
Yeah there are those places, and northern Europe is not one of them!
The WHO guide others are posting says fans only work under 40C, but that's the absolute maximum. There's no other option than resorting to devices based on refrigeration cycle when people are already dying("estimated through excess mortality" or however you dress it up), beyond being useless(human cognitive performance significantly degrade at above 28C).
The upper bound of 40C quoted in other comments is also just absolute maximum temperature - it's just saying that there's no way fans do anything if temperature of air and body are actually equal. The practical upper bound is lower than that(humidity and metabolism dependent, I guess).
personally I tried one summer back here in Europe without AC just with ceiling fans in each room and gave up and installed AC next year, that was like 10 years ago, can't imagine just ceiling fans in these 35-40C heatwaves, you will be just moving hot air since building can't cool down even in night
We equipped our founding era building with wall heating and will test out the heatpump based cooling next summer, if it's not enough I would consider installing a small AC unit, that's super easy as well.
Don't know what the article wants to say, there's no ban on AC anywhere in Europe and small units are quite affordable, you can get a single split unit from Mitsubishi for 500 € from Italy. The only nuisance is that installation is heavily regulated in Germany so they rip you off with insane cost. That's definitely a thing that needs to change in my opinion.
> The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. [2]
It's nothing more than US libertarian think tank trying to influence EU policy... Perhaps in an effort to push more anti climate change agenda/discourse in US (but that might be just my projection).
Thank you, case closed.
[1] https://humanprogress.org/about/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute
>the RKI estimated roughly 2,600–4,900 heat-related deaths annually in 2022–2025
>Germany reported about 2,800 COVID-19-associated deaths in the 2024/25 season, which covers most of the 2025 winter and spring.
so yes, taking Germany as the example, the world-ending plague now kills fewer boomers per year than summer does, despite it being over 4 years since anyone wore face condoms or gave a shit about bi-weekly boosters.
so I don't think it makes sense a Hans from Hamburg with 0 future descendants to self-flagellate over his carbon footprint. The Abdul from Mogadishu may emit less CO2 over his own lifetime, but each of his 5 children will have 5 children, and no one will scold him for it.
(I would use something other than "Abdul from Mogadishu" as the counterpart, but the only remotely European people not going extinct are some subgroups of Israeli Jews.)
The ability to create new accounts so easily and be a nuisance is my least favourite "feature" of HN.
psycho stalkers who will go through your whole comment history to construct an ad hominem are half the reason why people use throwaways, btw ;)
Source: https://www.goteborgenergi.se/foretag/fjarrkyla
I also have reservations about why an American libertarian think tank writes about what Europeans should do, but that's probably on me.
My thoughts exactly, except in my mind it's pretty clear that it's about influencing the climate change discourse... The less people are bothered by the rising temperatures, the more they will acquiesce to environmentally unfriendly policy.
Good luck with that.
Conveniently, cooling is especially needed when the energy production from solar is at its maximum.
I've been part of projects building 20-40 MW solar installations in southern germany and on average we throw away >50% of what we generate.
There is SO MUCH SOLAR now, we don't know what to do with all the energy.
If a 10-day heat wave cuts work productivity by 10% (which is optimistic IMO, it's probably worse in countries where people aren't used to it), that's equivalent to a 1-day general strike. If the workers actually managed to pull off a general strike in modern times, you can be sure the state wouldn't be happy with business as usual.
Europe had tens of thousands of excess deaths from heatwaves this year. It's not about american think tank but basic will to avoid suffering
Domestic connections in the UK are built with an average peak consumption of about 1.5 to 2kW, you can draw ten times that, but its unlikely every house will do that at the same time, so it's just like a contention ratio on a network.
Now imagine everyone charges their car, even if it's only for an hour, but when they get home at 7pm, same time as putting on the kettle and the oven, that's way higher than the substation can provide.
One study put a fully electric car/heatpump/cooking about 4 times the peak demand of an ice/gas heating house, even if total usage is only twice as much, and total energy use is far less than with ICE/gas. Throw in solar and it reduces the total power drawn from the grid, but not the peak amount. Drawing 20kW for one hour is far more expensive to service than drawing 1kW for 24 hours, but uses less energy.
> Drawing 20kW for one hour
Why would you fast charge if your car is going to be parked at home overnight anyway
20kW is the maximum input to a typical UK home (80A or 100A breaker). You can draw that fairly easily.
But a street of 100 houses is not drawing 20kW to each house at the same time, or 2MW to the street. Standard models put it around 200kW. The substation can be overspecced to 300kW and there's no problem.
Convert everyone to electric and that substation needs to be upped far higher.
> that electricity has to be made from using coal gas or other stuff, renewables are not a big share in most of them
If we're talking about Europe as this thread was, fossil fuels are 35% of the grid and dwindling (it was over 50% 20 years ago). Coal is only 11%.
> Those cables transferring electricity loses a lot of energy and gives off lots of heat but you won't see that
Transmission losses are 5%. Transporting oil (be it by ship, truck or pipeline) isn't free either.
But I have to say, AC is not "banned" anywhere in Europe, apart from certain cantons of Switzerland. In Germany you have a right to AC actually, if your community votes to "veto" the installation a court can overturn that.
Exactly, the whole premise of the article is a bit of a strawman. In fact, where I live, the demand for AC installation is so high that you have to wait months for a company to install a unit for you.
These extreme heat waves are a fairly new phenomenon, summers in central Europe just didn't use to get so hot for such a long stretch of time even a few decades ago. Now that they've become the way they are, people are doing what? Correct, installing AC units. Imagine that.
But let's not forget that energy is also on average a lot more expensive in Europe than in the US. The cost plus environmental concerns, which seem to fair less high in the public conscience on the other side of the Atlantic, have also been reasons why people were not keen on AC units in the past.
The price of energy in Europe is largely determined by taxes and policy costs. Gas is mostly unencumbered. Electricity could be as well. It's a political choice to make electricity expensive.
Furthermore, given that many Europeans couldn't care less about the negative externalities of gas heating, it's very hard to argue that this is a major concern for AC, especially when AC is already mainstream in cars.
And regarding ACs in cars: you will certainly agree that cooling the inside of a car vs. the inside of a whole house differ by orders of magnitude regarding the energy required.
In the UK, if you own a house, you generally have permitted development rights to install one, subject to some fairly common-sense rules. If you live in a flat, though, it’s a very different story: you will need planning permission *as well as* freeholder consent, and the process generally involves engineering/structural/architect drawings and freehold-consent paperwork. The freeholder can also charge you their legal and administration costs, even if they ultimately reject the application. Essentially it's >5K of paperwork which might be wasted if it's rejected even just to install a single 5KW split.
So in the hottest parts of London and other major cities, where a large proportion of people live in flats, installing AC can be very difficult in practice. In the cooler commuter towns, where houses are much more common, it’s considerably easier.
Why can't they build it into new flat blocks/houses? Nothing outright prevents it but everyone does their best to discourage it. The London Plan, for example, uses a “cooling hierarchy” which 'seeks to reduce any potential overheating and also the need to cool a building through active cooling measures' so good luck getting planning for it.
The standard here are heat pumps, at least for residential housing. It is really only a problem if you live in blocks or apartment buildings that are housing associations, with strict rules regarding how such heat pumps should be installed.
With that said, for my travel to Europe - especially down south, AC in the hotel room is an absolute necessity. A couple of years ago we ended up in a completely booked hotel in Italy (mid July), where the AC in our room was busted - it was beyond miserable. Ended up changing hotels after one night.
Pretty much all you need to know in 2026.
They think global warming is a minor threat that requires minimal to no changes in regulations, but heat waves (that, according to her, have always been the same every year) are a massive threat to the public and requires immediate changes in regulation.
How would you feel if your neighbour started doing something that was good for them but disastrous for you? Or something with good intentions that turned out to just be a huge mistake causing billions in damages, maybe even lives lost?
Weather engineering is extremely risky, we can barely predict the weather a few hours in advance. We have no idea what kind of havoc we might cause trying to do it on a large scale.
It's not ideal during a drought though to be using water like that, it would be nice if we had a grey water tank system so we didn't have to waste drinking water. It doesn't seem possible to install a grey water tank like that in our apartment though. Given our apartment already has district heating, there's not a super strong reason why it couldn't have district cooling as well, but the regulations are not in our favour here.
We installed it all without planning permission, although it still might require permission from the freeholder depending on the rules regarding Service Media alterations (as it requires new plumbing for our mains water).
My house has 65 cm / 2 ft stone walls, which makes the normal temperature changes throughout the year very gradual because of the enormous thermal mass of the walls. But once the walls heat up during prolonged heatwaves (which are becoming more because of climate change), AC becomes remarkably ineffective at cooling because the walls will continue radiating heat into the rooms.
Yes, AC is harder in old building with solid walls as is common in UK & Europe. We have a portable AC unit since March this year, and are very glad of it. It doesn't solve everything but it helped us through the worst of the heat.
All of that is nuance, and nuance is notoriously ineffective when replying to propaganda that relies on black and white thinking, volume and on changing the subject to something related, emotive but not as consequential.
Its funny how its mostly US-based libertarian types concerned about AC in Europe. There are plenty of things Europe over-regulates, but this is not it.
But hey, at least we preserved the nice 19th century Parisian landscape.