Sant Pere més Baix, 7, 3a planta,
08003 Barcelona
Dona suport econòmic al projecte de Dones Visuals
“Last year in Beijing, during a heatwave, 50% of the power electricity capacity was going to air conditioning,” says the International Energy Agency (IEA). Did you know this information?
As recently as 1990, there were only about 400m (1,000 (four thousand million)) air conditioning units in the world, mostly in the US. Originally built for industrial use, air conditioning eventually became to be seen as essential, a symbol of modernity and comfort. Then air conditioning went global.
Nowadays, there are just over 1bn (one billion 1,000,000,000) air conditioning units in the world right now – about one for every seven people on earth. Numerous reports have projected that by 2050 there are likely to be more than 4.5bn, making them as ubiquitous (seeming to be everywhere, omnipresente) as the mobile phone is today.
The IEA (the International Energy Agency) projects that if the developing countries reaches similar levels of consumption, air conditioning will use about 13% of all electricity worldwide, and will produce 2bn tones of CO2 a year – about the same amount as India, the world’s third-largest emitter, produces today.
So I am going to talk about Air conditioners that are almost uniquely power-hungry (wants power excessively) appliances (a piece of electrical equipment with a particular purpose in the home, electrodoméstico):a small unit cooling a single room, on average, consumes more power than running four fridges (the appliance that has the higher consumption on electricity). As the world gets hotter, buying or not an air conditioner is perhaps the most individual answer to climate change.
The invention of the air conditioner is credited to Willis Carrier, an American engineer at a heating and ventilation company, who was tasked in 1902 with reducing humidity in a Brooklyn printing factory. Today we assume that the purpose of air conditioning is to reduce heat, but engineers at the time wanted to create the most stable possible conditions for industrial production – and in a print factory, humidity curled sheets of paper and smudged (not clear, borroso) ink.
Carrier realised that removing heat from the factory air would reduce humidity. Then as now, air conditioning units works by breathing in warm air, passing it across a cold surface, and exhaling cool, dry air. The invention was an immediate success with industry – textile, ammunition, and pharmaceutical factories were among the first adopters. In 1929 the White House installed air conditioning. But during this period, most Americans encountered air conditioning only in places such as theatres or department stores.
It wasn’t until the late 1940s, when it began to be in people’s homes, that the air conditioner really conquered the US. By 1938 only one out of every 400 American homes had an air conditioner; today it is closer to nine out of 10.
What fuelled the rise of the air conditioning was not a sudden explosion in consumer demand, but the influence of the industries behind the great post-war housing boom. Between 1946 and 1965, 31m new homes were constructed in the US, and for the people building those houses, air conditioning was a godsend. Architects and construction companies no longer had to worry much about differences in climate – they could sell the same style of home just as easily in New Mexico as in Delaware. By 1970, 35% of American houses had air conditioning.
At the same time (1950), commercial buildings were springing up across the US. The all-glass skyscraper, a building style that, because of its lack of ventilation, often requires more than half its electricity output (production) be reserved for air conditioning.
