Can We Solve the Air Conditioning Paradox? - YouTube (1)
- Hey, smart people, Joe here.
Almost 70 years ago
builders in this neighborhood in Austin, Texas,
created a radical experiment in the houses around me.
They installed air conditioning.
(objects clattering)
Okay, that might not seem extreme by today's standards
but at the time, central air conditioning was only found
in big public buildings like, offices, hotels,
movie theaters, but not individual homes.
So in an effort to get central air conditioning
to catch on among average middle class homeowners,
the builders who were also air conditioning manufacturers,
built these 22 houses, an experimental neighborhood,
where researchers could study the effects of cooling air
on people's health and productivity.
They called it the air conditioned village.
This neighborhood and that weird social experiment
that took place here set in motion a movement
that would have impacts far beyond
what those home builders ever imagined.
Today, air conditioning is one
of the most significant contributors to climate change.
10% of global electricity consumption is used
to cool buildings and worse, the energy that we use
for cooling is on track to triple by 2050.
Running today's cooling systems creates millions of tons
of greenhouse gas emissions,
from running the machines themselves
and the dangerous chemicals inside them.
We've cooled ourselves into a crisis.
This is the paradox of air conditioning.
In a warmer world, more people need to keep cool
to stay healthy and productive.
But air conditioning the way we do it now
is only making the planet hotter.
See the problem?
keeping cool is setting us up for big trouble.
Now, we're not about to give up air conditioning
but we need a better way to do it
and that might just be on the horizon.
(gentle funky music)
Over the centuries, people in hot places
have developed a whole bunch of ways
to keep their homes cool.
Ancient Arabs in North Africans
use towers called wind catchers
to drive breezes into dwellings.
Romans ran water from their aqueduct
through the walls of some homes to cool them
but modern cooling wasn't born until 1902,
when this American engineer named Willis Carrier
harnessed the power of thermodynamics to cool spaces.
This printing factory in Brooklyn, New York,
was too hot and humid, the pages were wrinkling,
ink was running off the paper.
So Carrier designed a machine that used a system
of fans, ducts, heaters, and steam pipes
to control both the humidity and temperature of the factory.
And modern air conditioning was born.
There was a ton of money to be made
if people could be convinced
to put air conditioning in their homes.
So here in the air conditioned village
engineers outfitted 22 houses
with different cooling systems, fans, roofs, shades,
and insulation.
Then over the next year
doctors monitored the family's medical conditions.
Psychologists probed their mental health
and economists even measured the resident's productivity.
- The opportunity of every American
for a still better living standard
will certainly be enhanced.
- So what did the experiment find?
Researchers concluded that not only was AC practical
to use in the home but that those
with air conditioning were healthier, more comfortable
and more productive.
Air conditioning, in other words, made life better
and it completely reshaped life in the 20th century.
Today, air conditioning is in 9 out of 10 American homes.
It enabled a massive population migration
to the American south and west,
which completely reshaped the country's political power
in the late 20th century.
Air conditioning has helped economies explode
in places with unbearable heat,
like, Singapore and Dubai.
It's changed the way we build,
making skyscrapers a normal part of every city skyline.
Cooling indoor air protects hundreds of millions of people
from heat stroke and other health risks
from high temperatures, drugs like insulin
and antibiotics can be stored safely,
saving millions more lives.
Today there are roughly 2 billion air conditioners
installed worldwide, and that number is growing fast,
which is good for people's health and happiness
but potentially devastating for the climate.
We need to fix this, but first we need to talk
about how air conditioning actually works.
Warming up a room is pretty easy.
Burning fuel converts chemical bonds in the fuel into heat,
but air conditioners cool by moving heat
from one place to another,
their secret weapon is evaporation.
Maybe you remember your science teacher once saying
that evaporation is a cooling process, but why?
Well, when the temperature of a substance rises
it means its molecules are moving more.
When a molecule in a liquid jiggles enough
to break free of the rest of the liquid,
it takes a little bit of jiggling energy with it,
so the liquid left behind is cooler.
That's why evaporation lowers temperatures
in air conditioning.
(gentle music) (birds chirping)
Here's how a typical air conditioner works.
A fan pulls in warm air from your home,
where it meets coils full of a liquid called refrigerant.
Some heat from the air is absorbed by the refrigerant,
which causes the refrigerant to evaporate into gas
and leaving cooler air behind.
That process moves heat from inside a room to outside,
which is why the exhaust from an AC blows warm air.
Now the liquid refrigerant is ready
to start the evaporation process all over again.
This is called the vapor compression cycle.
It was the idea behind Carrier's very first air conditioner
in 1902, and it is driven virtually every air conditioner
and refrigerator for that matter since.
But there's no such thing as a thermodynamic free lunch.
The compressor and the fans inside air conditioners
eat up a ton of energy and the hotter the weather,
the more energy that they need.
During some heat waves, ACs can account
for up to 70% of local electricity demand.
In September, 2022, for example, evening temperatures
in California soared over 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
The power grid straining to run millions
of air conditioners almost collapsed.
Now today, fewer than 20% of people
in major developing countries like Indonesia, India
and Nigeria have any air conditioning at all.
But as the middle class in those countries grows
the number of air conditioning units could triple by 2050.
And since cooling units take warm air
inside buildings and push it outside,
more indoor air conditioning could raise daily temperatures
in some cities by several degrees.
All of those new air conditioners will require
an estimated 2,000 gigawatts of new power production,
which, if it's not green energy, could make
current global warming emissions targets impossible.
But energy use isn't the only climate threat
from air conditioners.
You see, the refrigerants
inside air conditioners are nasty pollutants on their own
and they used to be even worse.
In the 1980s, scientists discovered the main refrigerants
used at the time called CFCs,
were destroying the ozone layer.
So in 1987, nations signed a treaty to ban them
and companies replaced them with refrigerants called HFCs,
which are generally found in today's models.
You can think of these as refrigerants 1.0
and they are a climate nightmare because it turns out
that HFCs are 100s to 1,000s
of times more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide.
So when air conditioners leak
or they're disposed of improperly,
all of that greenhouse pollution hits the atmosphere
and well, that's a huge reason
that HFCs are the fastest growing greenhouse gas.
At this rate air conditioners could unleash
as much warming power as 40 years of carbon pollution
from today's power plants
and that would add almost a full degree Fahrenheit
to global temperatures this century.
(transition whooshes)
We need to fix the way that we stay cool.
A part of the solution, of course,
is just making better buildings
that need less air conditioning,
like installing light colored roofs, better windows,
even fans to just pull warm air out of buildings.
But we'll still need air conditioning and refrigerants 1.0
and the air conditioners that use them,
just aren't up to the climate challenges that we face today.
Some researchers have tried developing new refrigerants
that could run today's AC units
but aren't greenhouse gases, but that hasn't been easy.
- So far it's quite tricky to find a refrigerant
that has no issues.
It's either like, it has some toxicity or flammability,
a problem or it is very high greenhouse effect
or ozone depletion or it's expensive.
- [Host] That's Hicham Johra.
- I'm associate professor in Denmark at Aalborg University
and my work here primarily around everything that relates
to energy and indoor environment in buildings.
- Johra and his colleagues in Denmark
are among a handful of scientists exploring solid materials
that we might use for cooling in the future.
Refrigerants 3.0, explaining how they work though
is a little tricky.
- Yeah, yeah, thermodynamics is not always a very intuitive.
- Okay, to get an idea of how these solid refrigerants
might actually work, grab a thick rubber band.
Rubber is actually a really weird solid
because if you stretch it really fast, it feels warm,
you can try this, okay, put it against your lip,
it's really sensitive to temperature
and stretch it really fast.
You feel that? It feels warm.
Now keep it stretched and release it really quick.
It feels cool.
Why is that?
Rubber is made of loosely packed chain like molecules,
we call polymers.
And when a rubber band is relaxed,
those chains are all tangled up
and don't have very much order to them.
Another way of saying that is their entropy is high.
When we stretch a rubber band,
it's molecules get more ordered, the entropy is lower
and when you release it,
the polymers jumble back up and the entropy increases again.
There's some complicated physics and thermodynamics
and math going on here under the hood
but basically when the entropy goes down, this system,
this rubber band gives off heat
and when the entropy goes up,
the system takes in heat from around it, it gets cooler.
Rubber is one of a rare class of solids that do this,
where physical forces make them absorb
or give off heat.
They're called caloric materials.
Scientists are testing caloric materials
that change temperature when they're stretched,
squeezed under pressure, charged with electricity
or put near strong magnets,
hoping that they might give us a whole new generation
of refrigerants that are better for the environment
than liquid or gas refrigerants.
- They don't have the same problems
as vapor compression refrigerant,
'cause they're solid, they're not gas.
They will not go in the atmosphere,
so they will not problematic
for the ozone or greenhouse effect.
If you would use like a solid refrigerant that is, you know,
contains lead for example, and then you circulate some water
or some coolant in it and you have leakage,
then of course it can be a problem of toxicity.
- But while these next generation refrigerants
have shown promise in small scale lab experiments,
they have still got a long way to go
before they're ready to meet the challenge
and the scale of how the world uses air conditioning.
- The main concern, it's more the price
when they are based on rare-earth materials
and also the complexity to manufacture them
and also the durability, how they will last over time.
- We don't get to rewrite the rules of thermodynamics.
Cooling buildings is just a hugely energy intensive
thing to do.
We've got to escape that cooling paradox as soon as we can.
But solutions like caloric materials
are unfortunately still in their infancy.
(birds chirping) (gentle music)
There's a lot we can do now
by making buildings just get less hot,
painting roofs lighter colors,
installing better windows and insulation,
that kinda boring Home Depot stuff.
But we need to change the way we stay cool in a big way.
There's a lot at stake regarding the future
of air conditioning.
And for me, here in Austin, it's personal.
My family and I live in a city
that routinely gets over 40 days a year,
in which temperatures rise over 100 degrees.
Most years during the 20th century
