Ending Europe's War On Air Conditioning
One of the core F2N theses is that we are about to see the emergence of ‘the Internet of Electricity’. Here, I’ll talk about a key element of electrical infrastructure: heat pumps, and their use as A/C.
Despite having worked in technology for decades, in order to keep my UK architects license, I have to do Continued Professional Development projects, which are now mandatory after a fire in a London tower block in 2017 that killed 72 people eventually led to an overhaul of the fire regulations.
Some of the updates are sensible but others were clearly an over-reaction and even the UK architect’s institute, the RIBA, thought so. Over prescriptive legislation has led to unintended consequences through complex rules that impacted people’s ability to get mortgages, home builders to build to solve the UK housing crisis or the use of timber in construction. The rules had become political, but to challenge them was to face the accusation that you didn't care about lost lives.
As current temperatures in Northern Europe are a massive 50% higher than July average and climate change makes periods of extreme heat the new normal, twice as many people have died in the UK in a single weekend than die in building fires, yearly. But unlike Grenfell, the political pushback is against the architectural thing that could solve it - air conditioning, where building regulations throughout Europe discourage A/C use and in some places effectively outlaw it.
You can’t argue about the fire regulations or you are accused of not caring about people’s lives, but you aren’t allowed to argue about people’s lives when it comes to energy regulations or you are accused of not caring about the planet. As I’ll show here, air conditioning in buildings in Europe should now be a mandatory component of infrastructure, their use can have minimal climate impact and they are actually already in place anyway.
Aside from such extreme cases where elderly or vulnerable people have died during heat waves, there is an estimated 2% productivity drop per degree above 23C. Current regulations throughout Europe limit commercial cooling below 26-28C, which potentially means a 6%+ plus drop in GDP output during hot summer months, even with air conditioning, where it is temperature restricted, since GDP is a direct function of productivity. Even if this is just for a short period, if you consider that peak to trough, the global financial crisis and the extreme recession it caused resulted in a 4.3% drop in US GDP, the impact on economic wellbeing in the continent that is warming most rapidly from limiting A/C, is significant.
If this sounds like an over reaction, consider the case of Singapore. It went from being one of the poorest to one of the richest countries in the world, per capita, and its founding father, Lee Kuan Yew attributed this primarily to one thing: "Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency."
As it happens, air conditioning is de facto mandated in new buildings in Europe, as heat pumps are a recommended alternative to fossil fuel sources for heating and a heat pump is just a reverse air conditioner. Most modern heat pumps have a switch for dual use and many systems sold as air conditioning, globally, are actually just rebranded heat pumps.
But environmental regulations for new buildings such as those in the UK specify overall energy use not just climate emissions, so if a heat pump is explicitly intended for cooling then its use could violate the building regulations. The solution is often one of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’, where heat pumps are installed and calculations are based purely on heating.
For a more extreme example, Switzerland imposes some of the most restrictive, bureaucratic, and arguably Orwellian limitations in Europe on using heat pumps for air conditioning. In cantons like Vaud and Geneva, authorities legally prohibit homeowners from activating the cooling function of reversible heat pumps—even though the hardware is fully capable—unless they obtain a rarely granted, highly bureaucratic “cooling permit” that often requires proof of medical necessity and environmental justification. Installers are sometimes mandated to disable cold mode at installation and cantonal inspectors may audit usage logs, scrutinize smart systems remotely, or claw back subsidies if cooling is detected. Even neighbors can trigger investigations by reporting the hum of an outdoor unit during a heatwave.
The unintended consequence of Swiss Romande hysteria about air conditioning is that people just go out and buy portable A/C units which are far less efficient, instantly negating the whole point of the regulation. The recent spike in portable A/C unit purchases in Geneva—233% in just one month—is especially dramatic, showing a shift from occasional to essential use.
More illogical than all this is the fact that Switzerland’s electricity grid is anywhere between 91% and 97% zero emissions, so running A/C has almost no impact on the climate, as can be seen from the graph below.
The logical fallacy of focusing on energy saving vs emissions reduction, stems from confusing energy with physical resources. Energy is not a finite resource like materials, it constantly shines down from the sun and is necessarily wasted back into space. Consuming energy doesn’t heat the planet, consuming the wrong type does. The environmental argument against consumerism does not hold for zero-emission energy.
The issue is, of course, that an environmentalism based on lowered consumption of everything (even if that consumption, such as Swiss electricity, is environmentally benign), fits a certain world view where the potential for growth is an uncomfortable truth even if it can be proven to be sustainable.
But the problem with this unilateral de-growth stance is that there is only one planet and we all share the same planets weather system, so lowering productivity and reducing energy consumption in the continent that has the cleanest electricity in the world means that markets with far higher electric energy emissions are made more competitive, resulting in a net increase in carbon emissions, globally.
Lowered emissions themselves are still a great idea and the increase in competitive energy use elsewhere (leakage) only reduces their effect by 25%, but when it comes to zero emissions energy, Europe should increase overall consumption of it.
In summary, we need to continue the switch to heat pumps in Europe but support their use as air conditioning in building regulations and permits (with a focus on emissions not energy use) and remove restrictions where the grid is ultra low emissions (such as Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and France).
This will help people, the economy and the planet.
Quite interesting, but what the hell does "temperatures 50% higher" mean ?