I recently had a discussion about ACs and how they heat up cities.

Then I found an article about theoretical increase of efficiency of acs by using the heat pulled from a room to run a thermoelectric device and getting some of the energy back that was used in the ac.

I‘ve had this downstream thought many times already: since hot air is basically just energy stored. Could we theoretically pull (all?) the energy from the air (depending on desired temp) to cool it and casually fuel our society’s energy needs?

  • viq
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    fedilink
    11 year ago

    @Haui there was some work done recently on improving efficiency of solar panels by putting underneath a layer that converts the heat into electricity, also cooling the panels and thus improving their efficiency. So, maybe?