You don’t need to do that with any kind of precision. Random starting and stopping has the same effect over a large number of households.

or you know, dont live in the desert e.g Phoenix Arizona, or if you do decide to live in the desert then realise that's your choice and dont add to pollution and climate change by trying to cool down a desert with AC.

Heating is far worse than cooling for energy consumption. It just doesn't produce the same moral outrage that AC does.

Which is funny, because you can always and universally add an extra layer of clothes to keep warm. You literally don't need heating as long as you forgo internal plumbing. But there is no universal alternative to AC to cool something down and people die all the time from heat exhaustion at home.

I have noticed this too. It is just AC is perceived as decadent and heating as primitive. It takes a fancy machine to cool your house, but you can heat your house by burning a log. The actual energy expenditure to accomplish temperature change doesn't affect how people how energy intensive people view each method.

I live in the desert and there are tons of alternatives to AC that have been used for thousands of years.you can build structures partially underground, you can use the evaporation of water to cool the air, you can use wind catchers like the ancient Persians did, you can wear different colored clothing (Triple digits is not uncomfortable if you’re wearing light colors), you can sleep during the day and work when it’s cooler, and so on.

yes you can do all those things, but they only work if you actually do them. Which they dont. They rely on AC instead.

Just saw both these comments, and I can only reply to this.

To "oceanplexian": Note that I used the word "universal". Evaporative cooling only works in dry climates. And the funny thing about dry climates is that they almost all lack water. I'll never forget the feeling of dread and horror when I saw water fans in Madrid cooling outdoor seating areas.

Your desert cooler is an environmental calamity and they should be banned.

To "celticninja": Yes you can do all those things but not universally in any climate (which was my point) and where it is possible it's probably an environmental disaster to do so (I can't think of any city in a dry climate in the world that doesn't have a water sustainability problem). You see we rely on AC (to your point), because we've thought the problem through and didn't stop at a shallow understanding.

Jeez guys! If your climate is dry enough for swamp coolers to be effective, they're dry enough for solar panels to make sense (if you care about CO2. I don't, I'm on acetaminophen). And it makes a lot more sense than wasting mineral water (i.e. well water).

Do you also recommend that people don’t live anywhere it snows? I mean, heating up in winter uses even more energy than cooling down in summer.

It's funny that I have seen several anti A/C articles and several pro Heat Pump articles in recent times, do you think they know these are the same things in reverse? At least A/C is often used in sunny locales were solar can be used effectively.

AC is more than 100% efficient in heating the environment. This is unfortunate, but thermodynamics will win in the long run.

Heat pumps are more than 100% efficient at heating the house, which is what we want, and one of the places where we are on the same side as thermodynamics.

Fair enough, but direct heating of the environment is not of practical concern since it's effect is minuscule compared to GHG's. Point being, solar output is well correlated with A/C usage, which is a nice benefit and all that solar energy would be turned to heat anyway... so might as well have it cool your house :) Heat pump in the winter on the other hand, not so well correlated with renewables.

In the long run ACs are exactly 100% efficient at heating the environment. The extra heat is only temporarily displaced from the building being cooled, and will leak back in eventually.

There is heat generated by the system, and heat generated by the power generation used to power the system. It’s definitely not a neutral system - that’d be thermodynamically impossible ( increasing entropy without external energy)

If you power the AC with 100% solar shouldn’t there be no extra heat generated?

As in you’re merely absorbing some of the heat from the sun to then move existing heat around?

Frankly, even without solar power it wouldn’t generate “extra” heat directly over a long timescale, it would only accelerate the release of existing “heat” currently trapped in oil/gas/nuclear/etc.

There’s a fixed amount of sunlight hitting the earth every day, but not a fixed amount absorbed. A solar panel captures more heat than a white surface that bounces most of the light back into space. So the act of solar-powered a/c would still result in a net increase in global heat, unless you put the solar panel on top of something that was absorbing more heat than a panel does. I have no idea of the actual practical math of this - like does a black roof absorbs more or less than a panel? But solar energy isn’t impact free, even if we set aside panel manufacturing.

Once the heat is captured by the solar panel, I think you’re right using it for a/c is neutral - just moving heat around.

As for burning stored energy, that has to play into the heat dynamics of the globe. Like if you release it all at once it stops processes that would remove it from the atmosphere (animals and plants die), and it creates runaway heating feedback loops. there is some level of burning stored carbon that the planet can buffer and absorb and results in no change in global temperature. So burning stored energy in excess of that is a big problem. Like how you can sit or walk without noticeably sweating, but running causes you to have to actively cool yourself by sweating.

AC is also more than 100% efficient at cooling the interior too.

And the Delta(T) that an AC has to work with are far more favorable in AZ summers than a heating heatpump in MI's upper peninsula in the winter.

Same thing in reverse but where I live, in the summer I'm cooling from 30C down to 20C and in winter I'm going from -18 to 18.

Were they from the same people?