Aug. 23, 2006 — Keeping cool in a warming world is not only hard on the pocketbook and electrical grid — as recent record heat has proven — it is throwing a major roadblock in the path to lowering greenhouse emissions and global warming, say researchers.
The power needed to cool buildings over the next two decades is expected to rise faster than winter heating costs will drop from global warming, confirmed Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers who coupled a supercomputer climate simulation model to an economic model.
"Raising the temperature in summer is going to raise cooling (energy use), and raising the temperature in winter is going to lower heating energy," explained Oak Ridge’s Stanton Hadley, who coauthored a paper on the new coupled model in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
Their simulations looked at the "business as usual" scenario — in which people do nothing to reduce their greenhouses gas emissions and there are no new technologies introduced to lower the cost of cooling through the year 2025 in the United States.
The temperature rises they used for that period ranged from a lowball 2.2 degrees F (1.2 C) to more extreme 6.1 degrees F (3.4 C) that would come from doubling the carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere.
They found that while northern parts of the United States will see savings as the winters warm up, the southern and western regions of the United States will see their cooling costs rise higher and higher.
One of the causes of the air conditioning dilemma is that right now most cooling is done with electricity, which is generated far away with a lot of wasted heat at a central power plant. Heating, on the other hand, is generally done by burning fuels — natural gas, oil or propane, for instance — in furnaces onsite.
"You burn natural gas and get 80 percent of the heat into the house," said Hadley. But you lose two-thirds the same fossil fuel heat when you use electricity from a natural gas-powered electricity plant, he said.
So with the current technology, people get a lot more bang for their buck heating than cooling, explained Reinhard Radermacher, director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Energy Engineering.
