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DOOMSDAY MACHINE — using the electricity of four refrigerators, demanding the power just when it is most difficult to provide, increasingly essential to comfort and even life throughout the world: this could be the machine that brings it all down.
Crushing household debt, a collapsing real estate market and a contracting economy have strangled consumer spending in China, especially spending on big-ticket appliances. One result of this is that sales of air conditioners have tanked, leaving manufacturers in China this spring with about 50 million finished units unsold, stacked up in inventory.
This is terrible news for industry and consumerism, but it’s good news for the planet. Because, it turns out, our frantic efforts to keep ourselves cool while the planet heats up are accelerating the heating of the planet. You could call it a feedback loop.
You might not believe this, but there are people still alive who remember when an air-conditioned theater or department store was a novelty to be experienced only occasionally, when air-conditioning a car meant rolling down the window. With the crank. But the industrialists saw their chance, and before long ordinary, middle-class people were living. working, traveling and shopping in air-conditioned comfort.
What began as a luxury soon became a perceived necessity in the temperate latitudes, but it was far more than that in the American South and in the tropics. Air conditioning made residential and commercial development possible where it simply could not have been done before, and thus transformed the economy of regions and whole countries. The distinguished American scholar Richard P. Nathan ranked air conditioning with the civil rights movement as one of the two biggest factors in changing American demographics and politics in the closing decades of the 20th Century.
In China, the economic “miracle” that saw the creation over a few decades of an enormous middle class consisting of former peasant farmers created enormous consumer demand for such things as blue jeans, smart phones and air conditioning. It is estimated today that there are one billion single-room air conditioners in the world, and that is not counting whole-house or commercial air conditioners.
All of this translates into a voracious and exploding demand for electricity. A whole-house air conditioner uses more electricity than 15 refrigerators. A heatwave just about anywhere strains the electric grid to its capacity, and sometimes beyond. In New York City in 2006 the system broke down and left 175,000 people without power for a week during a heat wave that killed 40 people. “Last year in Beijing, during a heatwave, 50% of the power capacity was going to air conditioning,” says John Dulac, an analyst at the International Energy Agency (IEA). “These are ‘oh shit’ moments.”
Even more ominously, air conditioning is no longer a luxury, or even an option, for people in large and expanding regions of the world. In a wet-bulb temperature of 94 degrees Fahrenheit, humans cannot live for more than a few hours. Sweating can no longer cool the body and it overheats until the central organs fail. This threshold is being reached and exceeded in more places, for longer periods of time, every year. In Qatar, one of the hottest places on earth, they are desperately trying to air-condition the outdoors — shopping streets, outdoor restaurants and stadia.
There is no good way to get off this gerbil wheel. The glut of unsold air conditioners in China is no doubt a temporary thing; they will be deployed, as will millions more in every part of the world, inexorably increasing the demand for electricity from fossil-fuel burning generators and aged grids, world without end until it ends. The day it breaks is gonna be a hot day in Hades.
Thank you Mr Lewis, this is interesting and important information. I think the problem has been compounded in many places by buildings that presume air conditioning and so have no natural ventilation nor shading, in climates where that is all that is really required. Worse, one sees buildings in hot climates that are essentially green houses so that the owners can enjoy the view without moving from their chair.
Where I live it is easy to stay safely cool even on the hottest days yet a/c is standard in cars. The grid and planet are being further taxed here by the expanded use of heat pumps, once installed they often get used as air conditioners, one hears them when windows are open at night.
Many years ago I sailed on various cargo ships in the tropics, some air conditioned, others not. Both were comfortable as those without a/c were designed for shade and ventilation. The real discomfort came if the a/c broke down on those so equipped.
It is bizarrely ironic that the popular solution to AGW is to spend our way to sustainability by more electric everything when the grid is already overloaded and is largely fed by ff and now windmills and solar panels that have enormous embodied ff in their manufacture, as you have pointed out elsewhere. Living more simply is ‘not on the table.’
DLTBGYD, Cheers Rob
It’s interesting that air conditioning was never something the public demanded. It was a need — like so many other of our “needs” — that was created by industrial marketing.
For more than 2 decades the term “public demand” has made me chuckle every time it has been used. First and foremost, the public, either as the herd that it is or individually, is not and has never been smart enough to demand anything!! The best that can be said is that they react (i.e., need/want/salivate) as programmed by the marketers just as surely as Pavlov’s dog. In the same manner, “life,” by and large, from the obscenely rich on down to the poorest is all about the motherf’n’ money, ALL other priorities rescinded. Everyone is going to witness, one way or another and WAY before the year 2100, the perspicacity of Fermi’s Paradox.
“You could call it a feedback loop.”
Ok, I will, and accepting that this is so is just one more reason I will never be forced to issue the great mea culpa of our era, “faster than expected!”
A quick anecdote; I live in Buffalo, and whenever it comes up in conversation that I not only don’t have central air, but have I don’t have an air conditioner at all, people look at me like I am a very weird person. They’re polite about it, usually don’t remark on it, other than to say something like; “that’s unusual,” but man, that look tells me everything.
I live Buffalo, New York, the World Capitol of Winter, I should not be a pariah because I am willing to, half a dozen times a summer, tough-it-out thru an 85 degree day, au naturel.
Yes that little device gorging itself on power meant you could substitute a bit of electricty and avoid a whole lot of building design and size issues, lower ceilings, small eaves, small rooms, no flow through ventilation etc. Made high rise and building on the cheap possible. Cannot imagine how you could survive in a high rise in Singapore, Jakarta, Manilla or any Northern city in Australia or Southern City in the US and else where without them, you can’t. I have lived in the tropics most of my life and seen the transformation from wide verandahs and high ceilings and raised structures with flow through grills and air catching and moving design replaced by modernistic boxes.
As a final anecdote one of the favourite put downs of local indigenous folk in this country is we gave em a brand new house and they trashed it – go and have a look. Well yes they did get a brand new house but one designed for life in latitudes with cold winters, small rooms, no eaves etc etc then they build the same boxes for the ‘coloured folk’in northern tropical latitudes – there you go enjoy. One night at 43C what do you reckon they did to make them passable – ripped out the windows pulled off the doors and when that did not work, dragged the bed outside underneath the nearest tree. See no airconditioning, uninhabitable in that environment.
QUOTE:***Cannot imagine how you could survive in a high rise in Singapore, Jakarta, Manilla or any Northern city in Australia or Southern City in the US and else where without them, you can’t.***
I live in a high-rise in Singapore and I’m perfectly okay with an electric fan. No air-conditioning. ;)
There’s no engineering (or architectural) problem that can’t be fixed by throwing energy at it. I wish I could remember who said that.
To focus on a single consumer product and bemoan its existence is myopic, and to place the blame for its voracious appetite for electricity on “industrialists” is less than reasonable. We are all capitalists, whether we sell or buy. If all the consumers were to refuse to buy air conditioners(because we are suddenly enlightened or for whatever reason) the factories would soon stop building them.
Max is the only commenter who chooses to leave the product on the shelf, and that might be commendable, except he likely lives in a modern house, owns a refrigerator, enjoys indoor plumbing, sleeps in a comfortable bed, heats the air in his house in the winter season, probably drives a modern automobile, etc.
All of us are members of the same short sighted group of semi-intelligent hairless apes, all motivated by the same things. Fermi’s Paradox does not apply; The Tragedy of the Commons is much closer. Pogo’s identifications of the enemy in our midst is spot on.
How does Fermi’s Paradox not fit in? It seems to me it contains within it, all things,* including the Tragedy of the Commons.
Planet 7, in Quadrant 4, ruined their Commons, and is no more … and that’s why the 7s have never visited Earth.
And if we do the same, we won’t be visiting anyone either, and it might be a simple matter of a vice a versa situation all across the universe. The Tragedy of the Commons gets everyone in the end.
*Well, maybe not all things, but is a fairly all-encompassing question.
That’s called the great filter theory. Not sure if “great” is part of the title. In short, a civilization will extinguish itself via pollution, disease, violence (all of the above) before it can achieve inter-planetary travel.
“That’s called the great filter theory.”
Indeed it is. And the first Great Filter response was provided by same man who gave rise it, Enrico Fermi, at the same 1950 lunch in Los Alamos where he first posed – perhaps? – the deepest question ever asked, “where is everybody?”
Enrico informed his lunch-mates that he considered inter-stellar travel a theoretical impossibility (boring!), and we were off and running from there.
With all due respect, blaming the ‘industrialists’ is perfectly reasonable. Many non-Western peoples, such as the premodern Chinese, were quite okay with the original ways of life they followed and neither had any use for nor were impressed by the industrial way of life and its amenities when they came in contact with the Western world. It was only because of the hostilities of the West that the Chinese — reluctantly, be it said — chose to industrialise. The reason is simple: industrialisation enables you to make better weapons, the better to defend your home turf with.
The late philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend also noted that there were tribal peoples in today’s world who actively avoided contact with modern social milieux. They just wanted to be left alone.
Build up in the southern states due to air conditioning tells me we definitely need to move Trumps wall further north. Last thing we need is to get overrun by a horde of Los Vegasians!
Yup, build the wall on the 49th Parallel. Keep the southern population from migrating north.
Hear, hear good man!
Why grids suffer or fail during heat waves. (A) There is the load as described – A/C, water pumps, etc. (B) The grid components mainly rely on ambient temperatures for cooling. The two most vulnerable to this overload feedback thermal compounding are power transformers and overhead lines.
Power transformers have cooling radiators that usually cycle the insulating oil by convection which, in large part, determines the unit’s power capacity. Higher loads with higher temps exponentially decreases the capacity. And they have temperature and overload protection, so they will trip off. In very high temps I’ve seen lawn sprinklers running to cool the radiators (placed very carefully of course).
Overhead lines are impacted by solar radiation on the wire. The heating of the sun and load compounds to increase the sag of the line. Lines are designed to sag so much and that’s it. Some crossings have specific limits such as highways and waterways. If you were to notice on a hot day the transmission wires could be lower to the ground than normal. Utility personnel will go out and patrol the lines to provide real feedback to Operations.
This is one of the major factors in California for PG&E and their shutting down power lines. As the lines sag they also sway more in the wind. Contact with vegetation (they call all plant matter vegetation) and Blam-OW!! You’ve got a fire.
Should add thermal plants, including hydroelectric generation are also subject to derating during extreme heat events. Nuke and Coal cooling water feed source temperature rise can derate, or even shut down a facility.
Hydroelectric reservoir water temperature rise can cause a reduction of cooling in the turbine and thrust bearings. Or, water density is decreased and aeration increases during warm water events. Excessive aeration (water bubbles release) can cause cavitation causing the turbine shutdown.
In summary, all this electrical generation system equipment is routinely being pushed beyond the nominal operating range and into the exceptional operating range causing derating, or shutdown, and decreasing lifespan.