I am amazed by this: half the world spends energy cooling while at the exact same the other half of the world spends energy warming
There must be something to do about this!
Here are my not-serious-but-why-not proposals to deal and additional ideas about energy efficiency.
They mainly revolves around 4 principles: energy storage, energy transfer, energy shielding and energy production.
* build North-South bidirectionnal heat pipelines
It is like building very long aquaducs, up to a quarter of the diameter of Earth. The heath-transfer fluid gets warmed in the tropics while it cools them, then goes back towards the poles where its get cooled while warming the places.
But will it consume less energy pumping heath in the pipe than pumping in and out it locally how it is currently done? If the same principle of aquaducs can be exploited maybe not.
Will the transfer be so slow that heath disipate in the pipes before reaching destination?
* build East-West bidirectional electricity pipelines
if not for heath, the same principle could be applied with solar electricity: it should be captured on the sun-facing side of Earth and release on the other side of Earth. This way solar energy is also usable at night.
two mains issues: the energy dispersion along lines thousand km long, and the current low efficiency of solar production.
Have water stored in an undergound thermos.
The circuit is the following: themos > heat disipator (inside building) > heat collector (outside building) > thermos.
During the day cool water is pumped up to the disipator where it cools the building, then it goes to the heat collector when it is warm, where it gets warmer, then it goes underground to the thermos.
During the night warm water is pumped to the disipator where it heats the building, then it goes to the heat collector when it gets chiller, where it gets colder, then it goes to underground to the thermos.
the fluid could be any heath-transfert fuild,
the disipator could be standard radator
the collector could be solar panels
usuable only when there are great difference between day/night temperatures. i.e. in summer and desertic areas and unusable in winter.
* collect cold in winter, release it in summer, collect heath in summer, release it in winter
same idea has previous one but on much larger scales, both time-wise and dimension-wise.
* build with smartly-designed material that can disipate heath quickly and collect it difficultly and vice versa
e.g. metal sheets folded in a fractal patterns: it has lots of surface in a small space
for insulation: the longer the heath has to travel to get to the actual wall the harder it can warm it. A metal brick build in such a way would provide the largest possible paths for heath while still being sturdy.
for dissipation: the larger the surface of the disipator the more easily heath can be pumped out of the building.
* build thermos buildings
the building will be a large thermos bottle with windows in it. The layer of empty space between the two walls will make heat difficult to enter the building in summer and to exit the building in winter.
In order to prevent risk from large implosions, make small cells of vaccum.
* build underground buildings
no sun no heath, no wind no snow no rain no cold, stable temperature throughout the year, but no natural light also. Yet energy-wise that's good. Issue being that is not interesting to build "earth-scrapper", the opposite of sky-scrappers, because the deeper one get the hotter it gets, and then AC would need to be use throughout the year. Might be too dangerous in highly seismic and sinkhole areas. Would leave the outside for parks and nature.
* use IR opaque glasses for windows
just let the visible light in, not the heath light, so that it gets reflects both from the outside to keep the room cool in summer and from the inside to keep it warm in the winter.
* use opaque-adjustable glasses for windows
because mot of the energy of light come in precisely at visible light wavelength, being able to control the amount that is in is important. This is already done with adjustable blinds or diaphragms in front of the windows.
But Would be much better if it didn't impair vision. What about micro blinds not seeable (i.e. visible)? Or a layer of LCD so that the amount of light is adjustable? LCD requires power but this may less than AC. Stable LCD that maintain state without electricity.
Poor could get cheap one piece LCD, while rich could get actual screen able to make shades and fancy patterns. There is definitely a business to do here.
* store surplus electricity and release it to match consumption peaks
the idea is to have a constant supply of energy able to manage both baseline consumption and peak production. Energy can be produced outside peak hours and then released. Not having to switch on and off facilities is also a benefit.
for instance flywheel energy storage could be used.
nuclear energy comes to mind as a particularly suitable primary source, but so is solar energy, captured during the day and released at night.
* collect energy in the deserts
not oil of course, but what desert provide the most: space, sun exposition and day-night temperature difference.
I have in mind specifically the sand deserts of Africa and Arabia. They are very vast, very scarcely populated and intensely illuminated. Even large ugly energy production facilities would not bother people.
The energy collected should be either transformed, or pumped through a grid directly to distant foreign countries.
As always the questions are: would be this efficient, and if not, when will it become?
* capture the energy of heat with anti-refrigerators
build heat pumps and heath concentrators. This way heath collected at bellow boiling temperature can be collected and gathered at above boiling point temperature. The aim is to be able to produce heath or electricity (by associating turbines) in any place and any conditions.
In a way we aim at building an anti-refrigerator: we capture the heath outside a confined space, therefore cooling the exterior, in order to heath the interior of the box.
What are your crazy ideas for reducing energy consumption?
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