Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity

Same for Germany, at least in many places. And if your building gets reclassified as being under Denkmalschutz (cultural heritage management) you've won in the Lottery of Pain.

Yes, there are numerous reasons why this is harder to do than just doing it ad-hoc per apartment, but if we’re to see it as infrastructure, it should receive the same level of consideration as other utilities.

You can install one on the balcony below the railing level.

The housing company is responsible for the exterior surfaces and thus also responsible for whatever happens to fall on bystanders when it will inevitably happen.

AC installers are also notoriously bad at following placement guidelines.

That doesn't mean they shouldn't have A/C but rather all flats use one system with a large roof condenser, or where that is not possible district cooling or ground source.

In medieval times, not after, I hope.

Exactly, the whole premise of the article is a bit of a strawman. In fact, where I live, the demand for AC installation is so high that you have to wait months for a company to install a unit for you.

These extreme heat waves are a fairly new phenomenon, summers in central Europe just didn't use to get so hot for such a long stretch of time even a few decades ago. Now that they've become the way they are, people are doing what? Correct, installing AC units. Imagine that.

But let's not forget that energy is also on average a lot more expensive in Europe than in the US. The cost plus environmental concerns, which seem to fair less high in the public conscience on the other side of the Atlantic, have also been reasons why people were not keen on AC units in the past.

In England, if you own a house, you generally have permitted development rights to install one, subject to some fairly common-sense rules. If you live in a flat, though, it’s a very different story: you will need planning permission *as well as* freeholder consent, and the process generally involves engineering/structural/architect drawings and freehold-consent paperwork. The freeholder can also charge you their legal and administration costs, even if they ultimately reject the application. Essentially it's >5K of paperwork which might be wasted if it's rejected even just to install a single 5KW split.

So in the hottest parts of London and other major cities, where a large proportion of people live in flats, installing AC can be very difficult in practice. In the cooler commuter towns, where houses are much more common, it’s considerably easier.

Why can't they build it into new flat blocks/houses? Nothing outright prevents it but everyone does their best to discourage it. The London Plan, for example, uses a “cooling hierarchy” which 'seeks to reduce any potential overheating and also the need to cool a building through active cooling measures' so good luck getting planning for it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute

We've had a series of heat waves this summer, and temperatures have gotten very high inside. Much depends on the location of course, and the type of building, and stuff like that, but the fact is that in Belgium alone thousands of people have died because of the heat. Thousands of people that would still be with us if they would have had adequate cooling.

When it's close to 40 °C in your home, a ceiling fan is not going to make a meaningful difference.

And we need to keep in mind that summers are in all likelihood going to get hotter and hotter.

I don't know how bad the situation in Europe is, but we're already at point where there are times and places on Earth where one can construct a primal instinctive understanding of that by simply walking out of an air conditioned room(to which you SHOULD return within half an hour and MUST within an hour). "Just get fans bro" is tone deaf.

Tell me you're German without telling me you're German

HOAs don't make neighbors co-owners of your own property, do they?

Anyway HOA is something that shouldn't even exist. Or at least not with power to prevent people from having air conditioning in their home.

If it was just a matter of red tape it would be fine, but in France people would fight you on AC because it's ugly/noisy/warms up the street.

So you can get it rejected by people who live in a flat where heat is not as much of a problem as your (ground floor vs higher floor, window orientation) or by landlords who don't even live in the building.

People who don't have a balcony are screwed and are entirely dependent on homeowners association which arbitrarily can agree or not, or they can stay indecisive about it and not let you do anything.

Well, if you have a balcony? you just put it there and make the necessary holes for it, problem solved.

The effect is exactly the same - you just have AC installed. In one case you have to go through totally unnecessary hoops, and in other case, you just do whatever you want.

What's even the point of it?

Ouch, that's far too cold for me in the UK. I have the house at 20C during the day (68F), and only drop to 18C (64F) at night.

When I had poor insulation that meant heating was regularly on 8 months a year, although it's on less now I live in a well insulated house.

Places of emergency cooling refuge, parks, backup power to ensure energy/water continue, passive features like solar heating, natural ventilation, bioswales, air quality filtering, cool roofs/roads, water features, overhangs/louvers/awnings, insulation, thermal mass, etc, etc.

These are things grass roots can do now to mitigate impacts while governments dither and punt hard decisions into the future.

Dehumidifier works pretty well, provided it's built in to the AC unit, portable one's will increase the room temp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_QfX0SYCE8

Portable one's heat dispenser is inside your room, AC unit's outside. But the issue being, as it disperses the heat outside, it's probably still increasing the ambient heat?

Like they literally put on the sweatshot/hoodie in the early mornings with effing 27 degrees Celsius

That’s not a normal temperature for Europeans.

Also I could not imagine doing some serious thought work in temps like this.

There are a lot of studies of how mental performance is correlated with temperatures with men needing couple degrees even lower than women (eg 22 vs 24)

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Airflow helps a lot, of course. But it must be in swinging motions / constantly changing direction — nervous system doesn’t like same constant stimulus to the point of neuralgia if prolonged.

s/Europe/all parts of Europe/

I.e., Europe has a lot of different climate (sub)zones, and it heavily depends on where you actually live.

I'm fine with a fan in the Alps, where I sleep at 1,000 metres above sea level, and nights with the minimum temperature above 20°C are still very rare. I even don't bother turning the fan on most of the time, or just for an hour or so to clear the trapped heat in the bedroom at like 22:00 o'clock once outside cooled down enough.

OTOH I'm NOT fine in my Vienna flat with just a fan. There, this summer we got quite a few nights where the minimum temperature did not go below 25°C, even some with a minimum of 28°C and a maximum of 41°C. The flat is an old building and has only windows on one side facing a small curtilage without any trees or grass, so it traps heat, and I cannot even cool it well at night, even if the outside temperature goes a few degrees below the inside one, as the yard also traps heat.

Without an AC I could not sleep at all-even with a fan, it's very hard to sleep well above 25°, and frankly even above 23° for me. And I had to buy a much less efficient portable one (before the Midea Portasplit was a thing) because of braindead local regulations.

Ironically, in the winter the local gov suddenly starts calling those "bad ACs" again by their alternative "heat pumps" name, and they become the best thing ever for heating. I really cannot figure out how one can do that mental gymnastics without getting a headache.

Anyway, don't assume that your local conditions hold for all of Europe.

I was in Vienna this summer and the inside of the apartment was over 40 for the entire week. Thank god, we were able to buy a portable AC unit from Mediamrkt before they ran out.

Since when should there be AC in friggin' Norway?

Technology Connections has a new video exactly about it.

How would you feel if your neighbour started doing something that was good for them but disastrous for you? Or something with good intentions that turned out to just be a huge mistake causing billions in damages, maybe even lives lost?

Weather engineering is extremely risky, we can barely predict the weather a few hours in advance. We have no idea what kind of havoc we might cause trying to do it on a large scale.

They think global warming is a minor threat that requires minimal to no changes in regulations, but heat waves (that, according to her, have always been the same every year) are a massive threat to the public and requires immediate changes in regulation.

The story gets worse when you put heat pump to the same system - now you have to run it to its limits to have just enough heat in the water to make the radiators release enough heat to barely heat up the room.

Of course, it's only that simple to replace one heat source with another, why wouldn't anyone do it already?

What some people in the UK do is go to local air conditioned public buildings like libraries (which they are welcome to do) and occasionally a large air conditioned store or shopping centre.

You can get a portable split-system if you have a balcony.

But installing a real full-size AC with a large external unit is prohibited in most cases. If you’re renting you’re of course out of luck. An apartment, even one you own-forget it.

Conveniently, cooling is especially needed when the energy production from solar is at its maximum.

I've been part of projects building 20-40 MW solar installations in southern germany and on average we throw away >50% of what we generate.

There is SO MUCH SOLAR now, we don't know what to do with all the energy.

If a 10-day heat wave cuts work productivity by 10% (which is optimistic IMO, it's probably worse in countries where people aren't used to it), that's equivalent to a 1-day general strike. If the workers actually managed to pull off a general strike in modern times, you can be sure the state wouldn't be happy with business as usual.

Europe had tens of thousands of excess deaths from heatwaves this year. It's not about american think tank but basic will to avoid suffering

My thoughts exactly, except in my mind it's pretty clear that it's about influencing the climate change discourse... The less people are bothered by the rising temperatures, the more they will acquiesce to environmentally unfriendly policy.

There's a lot of buildings to tear down and convert if you want to legitimately make comparisons.

Even if it got a bit hot – like it does in mine, that has less volumetric heat capacity — simple floor scrub lowers temperature. Evaporating water is just a very good at that, and floor is a big area.

If we take a house made of paper and place it in a place with no trees and a lot of asphalt, I believe that AC could become a necessity. No amount of evaporating water could help you to fight heat rising from the road.

But I much prefer better houses and city planning

But hey, at least we preserved the nice 19th century Parisian landscape.

Are you considering answering this question? Was it the case fifty years ago? Did anything change?

So every adult human and corporation?