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I hope these get cheap enough that every house in the tropics gets them on their rooves. AC is going to become essential as temperatures rise, the grid can't support the load, and we can't afford to power all those ACs with fossil fuel. Solar powered AC seems like the most reliable way to survive a severe heatwave like the one described in the opening chapter of The Ministry of the Future: https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-t...

You can't rely on the underprovisioned grid in a scenario like that, especially since the heatwave will likely drive the power plants themselves out of their operating range. Solar seems like the only way. Its intermittency is a problem on general, but clouds that would disrupt the power would also stop the heat.

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It seems like you've never been in a place that had very humid hot summers. I can tell you that it does not require constant sun to be miserable in summer.

And without sun you can not power that solar and in humid hot weather something like a passive "swamp cooler" won't work either.

It seems you’ve never been in a sunny climate without aircon. People survive. It’s not crazy hard. Growing up in Australia, with temps regularly over 40, and the only aircon in the supermarket frozen section.

I wonder why do people assume that going forward heatwave intensity will stop before reaching the survivability threshold. It doesn't take too much, you just need an event where wet-bulb temperature persists over 35 Celsius to have healthy humans start dropping like flies en masse. If they don't have access to cooled premises, that is.

I have indeed been in a sunny climate without aircon. Sunny and humid in most summers.

That's why we installed the AC. When it's just hot it's fine. You just go outside and in the shade or dip in the pool.

When it's sunny and humid or it starts raining and you hope for a nice cooling downpour and then the rain just stops and it's even muggier than before you crawl inside and turn the AC up.

EDIT: and by turn up I don't mean freezer tenps. I hate that. We use it mainly to get rid of the humidity but that's how ACs cool anyway so temp goes down too.

I loved the humidity in Dubai... Some days. Preferences differ.

Dubai was weird. I don't remember humidity being an issue there to be honest. Was only there for 3 days or so though.

I vividly remember freezing on the bus though. Being outside was better.

What I also vividly remember was the beach. Totally different beach experience than anything else I've had before or after. It was really weird when I walked into the ocean and the water wasn't actually feeling colder than air around me. It was just suddenly wet around you but not cold ;)

Sounds like we're employing the same strategy. I'm not a big fan of AC overall, but OMG the humidity can be stifling. I have my thermostat set to 79F, sometimes I'll even raise it to 80F or 81F. I'm not looking for cool so much as I'm looking for not muggy. There have been days when the humidity is 68% or more but it's only 77F and it gets uncomfortable. Crank the AC down to 76F and it takes care of that humidity. Do you know if they make thermostats that put a priority on reducing humidity rather than just reducing temperature (for AC)? I mean 84F can feel great if it's not humid.

> It seems you’ve never been in a sunny climate without aircon

In Japan, in summer, you don't survive without aircon. 35 C with 90+% humidity, fans and opening windows won't help you anymore.

Australia has dry summers in comparison, which is really easy to withstand

It only got to 32°C in Japan when I was there but it was 100% humidity and it was the worst, like the air was impossible to breathe, immediate sweating and a feeling of almost claustrophobia. Aircon was essential and luckily ubiquitous.

> In Japan, in summer, you don't survive without aircon. 35 C with 90+% humidity, fans and opening windows won't help you anymore.

How did people survive until the widespread use of AC?

Japanese people are adapted to their environment and barely sweat, it makes you feel pretty gross as a westerner there with all these Salary Men in black suits and ties looking crisp while you’ve sweated through your shorts and t-shirt…

The rich had summer homes in the mountains, where altitude did the work.

Traditionally Japanese houses are designed to pass natural winds for cooling in summer. But now winds are no longer helpful so those houses are really bad for both summer and winter.

Japanese houses have terrible insulation. If you let all the hot air inside your house of course you'll need aircon.

Yes, I think LKY - basically the father of Singapore - summed it up best:

> Air conditioning. Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the single 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. [1]

Without AC, most of the cities in the tropics would not be anywhere near what they are.

It also brings to mind the importance of AC. It's not a nice-to-have. It can be as essential as heating is in cold climates, and unfortunately it's very clear from the ESG crowd that they don't realize this. They probably won't until we've seen massive death tolls during a heat wave.

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[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...

Yay condescension.

Heat waves are caused by heat domes, and they don't have clouds https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/07/10/heat-dome-...

Heat waves != Heat domes

Yes the 49C event in Vancouver and surrounding areas was a heat dome and didn't have clouds.

Where I live, just a bit earlier we had complete cloud cover for an entire day w/ "feels like 40C" hot and humid weather. It didn't rain that day, except once a little sprinkle. It made it muggier outside than it was before.

That's not a heatwave that's just heat.

Well, so what do you call a whole week of constant 34℃ during the day, but with clouds in the sky and even a brief (but intense) rain once? That's what we had last week in Poland.

Agreed. It's a heatwave when this kind of weather (hot/dry, hot/normal, hot/humid) persists. Sometimes in combinations of these conditions.

Something that is a heat wave in one place might just be called 'weather' in another place. If New Delhi got our "regular winter weather", it would be called way more than a "cold spell", while 2 weeks of New Delhi weather here is called a heat wave.

Proper insulation is way more efficient than AC. One of the main reasons there is so much AC in the US is because many buildings aren't well-insulated and historically energy has been incredibly cheap.

Insulation doesn't substitute for AC if the lows aren't low enough to cool thing down at night.

Not to mention that an AC installation is much cheaper than tearing a building down and building to back up.

No, not entirely, but it complements AC. Proper insulation means that much less energy is needed both to cool and heat a building.

> AC is going to become essential as temperatures rise, the grid can't support the load

What are you talking about? Electricity consumption due to AC is absolutely minimal, much less that heating houses in winter.

I don't think "absolutely minimal" is the correct description of the nature of A/C electrical demand.

EIA places the total percentage of A/C electrical expenditures at %12 in 2015[0], energy.gov cites it at 6% of the total usage[1]. This number looks pretty "meh", however note that A/C demand is highly variable, seasonal, and on a daily basis will spike quite a bit.

Contextualized with the annual data this is positioned within, the %6 usage is concentrated regionally, during the day, in the vaguely 4-month summer season in CONUS. Contrasted with heating electrical requirements, which operate more or less all the time in the winter (to prevent freezing pipes, and thermal inertia of a cold-ass house) and the averages of the electrical demand begin to look a lot different.

The relatively low aggregate demand is smoothed out of the highly variable nature of A/C load. Electrical load is immediately produced and consumed for the most part. An electrical grid will struggle to supply this peak-load demand a small but critical percentage of the time.

This A/C demand happily coincides with the times solar power will be most effective. It appears to me that solar is very well suited to augment the baseline load of a national/regional electrical grid to support peak summer demand. There is also some effect of the increased summertime temperatures on electrical grid transmission losses[2], but I'm not sure how all that shakes out.

[0] - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36692

[1] - https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/home-cooling-systems/air-...

[2] - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/11/1...

Most places with heavy heating loads use biomass, natural gas or fueloil. Electricity demand is limited to the exhaust/circulation fan.

The waste from solar panels can be toxic.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/solar-panel...

We might be replacing one problem with another. We need to move on from toxic solar to some unknown fuel of the future.

It's really bizarre that whenever solar is mentioned, someone chimes in with some claim about toxic materials in the panels, yet rarely do you hear these complaints about other ubiquitous products with hazardous materials, like televisions, laptops, fluorescent light bulbs, microwaves, or anything else.

The recovery rate for solar panels in developed countries is already close to 100%. Very few people are going to simply dispose of them in the trash, because they don't fit in the trash, and the contractors they work with are not going to dump them in the woods.

This is a common astroturfing technique.

"We might be replacing one problem with another. We need to move on from toxic solar to some unknown fuel of the future."

Notice the classic FUD sowing, ambiguity, and of course an oblique reference to some as-yet-developed economic synthetic fuel.

It's fair to say we will have to replace this with something not developed yet. It's honest and if you are scared by it others will come up with that solution.

I' ll offer a guess at a solution.. the next generation of power sources will be organically based and breakdown into non-toxic material and solar will be a part of that.

Solar panels are even better: they don't break down into anything, ever. They are completely inert, pre-vitrified from the factory and guaranteed to hold their shape for millions of years.

I’ve also noticed an ironic overlap between the “solar is toxic” and “windmills can’t be recycled” crowd with being pro-nuclear

> the contractors they work with are not going to dump them in the woods

They will if that's the cheapest option to get rid of them. Westinghouse dumped PCB-laden oil and transformers in the woods and that is still being cleaned up decades later.

30-40+ years ago they would flush it down the drain too. There are unscrupulous contractors out the wazoo, but today you will get your license yanked so fast.

> The recovery rate for solar panels in developed countries is already close to 100%. Very few people are going to simply dispose of them in the trash, because they don't fit in the trash, and the contractors they work with are not going to dump them in the woods.

The garbage will get shipped to corrupt third-world countries, then they can be safely dumped in the woods/water.

Not in Europe. There is also a market for these modules in developing countries. Used up modules are still working good enough for, say, remote areas in Asia or Africa. Why throw a working, for free, module away if you can use it?

It is not bizarre if everyone keeps bring up the same issue.

In your area they will be picked up and shipped to another country with lower environmental standards for disassembling.

These are some of the chemicals of concern: cadmium telluride, copper indium selenide, cadmium gallium (di)selenide, copper indium gallium (di)selenide, hexafluoroethane, lead, and polyvinyl fluoride. Additionally, silicon tetrachloride, a byproduct of producing crystalline silicon, is highly toxic

Silicon tetrachloride being a “highly toxic” “byproduct of producing crystalline silicon” is a new astroturfing mantra I’ve seen repeated lately. Too bad it’s recycled as part of the process (and is useful on its own for making high purity optical fibers) or solar enemies might have a point!

It is an intermediate product, not a waste product.

There was a highly publicized story in 2008 about Chinese silicon companies dumping it illegally. Ever since it's been repeatedly invoked as anti-solar ammunition. It's like constantly warning about melamine poisoning from milk because an unscrupulous company did that before too.

Additionally, in 2011 China set standards requiring that companies recycle at least 98.5 percent of their silicon tetrachloride waste.

It's fairly easy and cost effective to recycle once you have the infrastructure in place. It seems most of the pollution reports are from before the mandate and also when precursors were way cheaper relative to the final product.

SiCl4 is also entirely non-persistent in the environment. It reacts vigorously with water.

I don't understand the mechanism that hexafluoroethane would be produced by a solar panel.

I guess, that gas might be produced as an impurity during manufacturing, but wouldn't that be at the factory? That seems like something that would be really easy to monitor and regulate because fabs are expensive and rare.

could you explain more about the hexafluoroethane?

It been used as an etchant few decades ago for microchips.

You don't need to etch solar cells for any reason.

I don't know anything about solar panel recycling, but it's worth noting that other means of power generation via solar energy exist [1][2][3], most of which depend on mirror-concentrated heat and don't necessarily involve toxic chemicals or rare earth mineral extraction.

Photovoltaics have largely left these technologies in the dust, but if the long tail of solar panel production becomes a significant environmental concern, alternatives do exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-powered_Stirling_engine

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-concentrating...

[3] https://www.seia.org/initiatives/concentrating-solar-power

> Photovoltaics have largely left these technologies in the dust

How so? CSP tech continues to advance on multiple levels and usage continues to grow globally at grid scale with advances with tech in the solar field, concentrator design [1] and molten salt storage [2].

PV is not currently competitive at grid scale on its own (I've seen it being used more recently in tandem with CSP, but more like CSP providing most [gt 70%] of the MW), because storage costs are joke (wrt underlying materials for batteries and recyclability[3][4]) compared to molten salt (I'm totally ignoring environmental concerns).

I really think PV has more of an edge in small consumer market that wants/needs no storage at all.

[1] https://www.solarpaces.org/beam-down-demos-first-direct-sola...

[2] https://www.solarpaces.org/for-100-renewables-doe-speeds-up-...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25383534

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25403694

We're replacing the problem where we dump waste in the atmosphere with no clear path to ever getting it back out with the problem of storing potentially hazardous solids. The latter seems to be a much better problem to have. We already have that problem with most things we produce and we are moderately good at handling it.

But you can recycle them. Even says so in the article… so we just need a good recycling program. Not an option with fossil fuels, or nuclear or your super special unknown future energy source

If you look for waste all you see is waste.