Two recent developments offer hope and technology to keep cool with a lot less. In the hottest summer on record, that means a lot.



In hot climates, like the southern US, air conditioning can account for up to 80% of energy use. I remember teaching a class at the Houstonian  in Texas when the outside temperature was 105° F, and inside the hotel it was 65° and people were wearing sweaters. With killer coal providing 50% of our energy in the U.S., if we can cut back on AC, we’ll conserve energy, and save some of the 30,000 lives lost in the U. S. every year due to coal burning.

Two recent developments offer hope and technology to keep cool with a lot less. In the hottest summer on record, that means a lot.



The Coolorado system uses 1/3rd the power of hair dryer, or 1/10th the amount of standard air conditioning. It draws fresh air in and uses the same cooling process that transfers heat to a thunderstorm. Water is evaporated into air in one chamber within the air conditioner, and this cools the air flowing through an adjacent chamber. The cold air is used to cool the building while the humid air holding the heat is exhausted to the outside. This type of air conditioning actually works more efficiently at higher temperatures, so the energy savings are greater the hotter it gets.



Meanwhile, Inhabitat tells us about  researchers at the National Renewable Energy Lab have developed a new air conditioning process that can use up to 90% less energy than today’s units. The lab used membranes, evaporative cooling and liquid desiccants to achieve the ultra efficient results, which, if passed along to the market, could be huge in terms of saving both power and money.


Inhabitat

Similar in concept to Coolorado, these AC units use evaporative cooling to cool incoming air, and then a new technology, named DEVap, uses liquid desiccants (dryers) to remove the humidity from the cooled air. This is not your grandmother’s “swamp cooler” but works well in both high and low humidity situations.



The DEVap process uses salt solutions instead of chemical refrigerants, so it requires no chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) - which are bad for the ozone layer, and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). Both of these refrigerants also are 2000 times more heat trapping than CO2, so avoiding them helps stem climate change.

The National Renewable Energy Lab is hard at work on this technology; - hopefully we’ll see it in stores in the next few years. Until, turn the AC up to 72-74°, or buy a Coolorado system, or open the windows, or sit there and sweat it out.