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https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/heat-pumps-are-an-essential-wedge-but-have-a-hidden-downside-to-fix-d22e9722a1a0>
"For many more northern cities, air conditioning used to be an option. With
increasing heat waves due to global warming, it isn’t. Heat pumps provide both
air conditioning and replace heating with natural gas, and the heat is cheaper
in most places because one unit of electricity moves three units of heat from
outside to inside. That’s a win-win from a climate perspective, surely? Well,
it’s more complex than that.
Decades ago, the nations of the world agreed that the hole in the ozone layer
was worth fixing. The problem was chlorofluorocarbons, the most commonly used
chemical in refrigerators, air conditioners and aerosol cans.
CFCs were destroying the ozone layer. The world came together to sign the
Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer in 1987. Now,
almost 40 years later, the ozone layer is slowly recovering.
There is only one problem. The replacement for CFCs was mostly
hydrofluorocarbons. HFCs don’t mess with ozone, but they are thousands of times
more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Given that the issues with
greenhouse gases were well understood in the 1980s, hence the creation of the
UN International Panel on Climate Change in 1988, undoubtedly some nerdy person
pointed this out at the time but was ignored or overruled.
The summer after the Paris Accord was enacted the world came together again,
this time in Kigali in Rwanda in October of 2016. They agreed on the
Kigali
Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, which brought the greenhouse gas
implications of HFCs into the agreement. Now three quarters of the world’s
countries are signatory to it, including the superpower economies of the USA,
China and the EU.
There are alternatives that are proven and commercially available today, at
least in some places. Propane, for example, is inexpensive, effective and has a
very low global warming potential, a fraction that of carbon dioxide. It’s used
in a lot of air source heat pumps in Europe. And carbon dioxide itself is
actually a refrigerant. It’s common in hot water heat pumps like those from
Sanden.
This is such a cheap and easy climate problem to address that it’s #1 on
Project Drawdown’s list of climate actions sorted by cost vs benefit.
All’s well then, right? Well, not exactly."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
