Kapok | Not so cool after all

Eric Sautedé

We have known for some time that air-conditioning is not only bad for the environment, but also pretty dreadful for our health.

It consumes a lot of energy — far more than a fan; contributes to the “island warming” phenomenon in cities — pumping hot air from inside the houses to the street; increases air pollution; and ultimately makes a disproportionate contribution to global warming.

When it comes to airborne germs and bacteria, it acts not only as a propagator but also as a source of illnesses, especially when air con units remain dirty or worn out. If Legionnaires’ disease is one of the nastiest such illnesses, it remains luckily quite rare, contrary to colds and sore throats, that can easily become chronic ailments. In a previous job, air-cons were so badly maintained that I would regularly suffer from throat infections and voice loss after teaching only two classes in a row. But then, occupational diseases were the least of my concerns — sadly!

With record-breaking heat waves affecting the world, it seems only natural to question the all-out rush on air conditioning to cool down, even more so in our part of the world, where abusing the AC has become a way of life, so that one has to bring a jumper along to the movies, a shopping mall, hopping on a bus or sitting on a ferry.

In a recently released study by the International Energy Agency (IEA) entitled “The Future of Cooling”, we are reminded that the use of air conditioners and electric fans already accounts for 10% of overall global electricity consumption! Moreover, projections on energy demand for space-cooling indicate that without action to address energy efficiency and promote alternative methods of coping with the heat, the share of final electricity demand for cooling will more than triple by 2050 — space-cooling demand will represent 37% of the world’s overall electricity demand! In Hong Kong, the future is now as ACs already suck up 30% of the SAR’s annual energy. In Macao, as usual, ignorance is bliss, but as energy consumption has more than tripled in the past 18 years — soaring from 1,573 to 5,417 million KWh between 2000 and 2017 — we can legitimately postulate that air conditioning is the big culprit.

One recommendation highlighted in the IEA report — besides walking around naked, working at night, taking refuge in a forest and living in white-painted individual and well-ventilated houses with shades closed most of the time — is that policies to improve the efficiency of ACs could quickly curb demand and that such efficiency would bring major benefits, reducing the need to build new energy generation capacity, thus lowering investment as well as fuel and operating costs. Coupled with decarbonization, that would also translate into a massive reduction in cooling-related CO2 emissions.

In China, the challenge and opportunities are of epic proportion. China and the United States now account for more than half of the 1.6 billion AC units in use in the world, and the two taken together contribute to 55% of global cooling-related CO2 emissions. However, China is taking the lead when it comes to forecasted demand and, as reported, “in some places, such as Beijing on the 13 July 2017, more than 50% of the daily peak load [is] related to cooling.” One of the big issues has to do with coal power generation in China, but the disparity between the best available energy efficient AC units and the market average is also to be blamed — pricing is still an issue.

In Macao, this imperative to improve the overall efficiency of air conditioners was for a while factored into policy-making… but then the Environmental Protection and Energy Conservation Fund was terminated in December 2015. Why? Nobody ever cared to explain.