Decryption. Heatwave: How much does air conditioning heat the outside air?

After the days and nights we've just experienced, we're tempted to upgrade to an air conditioning system to face the upcoming heat waves. However, while it's comfortable, by cooling our interiors, it also helps warm up... the exterior.
With the heatwave barely over, some of you are considering better equipping yourself to face the next heatwave . The excitement is already visible in specialist stores, where fans and air conditioners have quickly disappeared from the shelves.
Nielsen IQ reports that, during the week of June 8-14, sales of these two products had already increased significantly: +253.9% for fans, +612.2% for air conditioners. For the latter, keyword searches on the online shopping site eBay.fr increased by... 756%.
A “maladaptation” to global warming?A craze for cooling is entirely understandable, given the sweltering heat we've experienced in recent days and nights. However, while air conditioning can be a great personal solution, it's not as virtuous as it seems.
While 25% of French people are equipped with one, according to a 2020 study by Ademe , air conditioning contributes more, according to its detractors, to aggravating the problem than to solving it. "Air conditioning is a maladaptation," declared Minister for Ecological Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher on Tuesday... from an air-conditioned room.
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The principle of an air conditioner , like a heat pump, is to extract heat from a room and expel it outside. Air conditioning helps to... warm the outside. But to what extent? Studies are not unanimous, given the numerous parameters, such as population density, green spaces and the level of air conditioner use.
+2.4°C in the middle of Paris?A 2014 study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research concluded that, "during the night, heat emitted by air conditioning systems increased the average air temperature two meters [above ground] by more than 1°C in some urban areas." Another research paper , dated 2020, imagines a scenario of a nine-day heat wave in Paris, similar to that of 2003. In one of the hypotheses studied, all buildings are equipped with air conditioning and it is massively used to maintain an indoor temperature of 23°C. An extreme scenario, then, but in this case, the air temperature would increase by 2.4°C in the capital.
"In areas with a high level of air conditioning, we are already seeing temperature increases of around 0.5°C, linked precisely to these emissions," Nolwenn Le Pierrès, university professor of energy at the University of Savoie-Mont Blanc, tells us in The Conversation .
"Air conditioning isn't horrible," engineer Jean-Marc Jancovici, president of the Think Tank Project, a think tank campaigning for the decarbonization of the economy, told BFMTV. But "if we have a lot of air conditioning everywhere, it creates excess heat in the street" and increases the risk of urban heat islands, he emphasizes: "Air conditioning is like a refrigerator in reverse: a refrigerator cools the beer and heats the kitchen, air conditioning cools the kitchen and heats the outside."
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According to projections by the International Energy Agency, there will be approximately 5.6 billion air conditioners worldwide by 2050.
How many air conditioners are there in France?
The equipment rate is increasing: it stood at 25% in 2020 compared to 14% in 2016, according to the Ecological Transition Agency Ademe.
In 10 years, from 2013 to 2023, annual sales of individual heat pumps (HPs), which serve as both heating and air conditioning, have tripled, to 1.2 million devices: more than 910,000 air-to-air HPs (+13% over one year), 307,000 air-to-water HPs (-14%) and 3,500 geothermal HPs (+18%), according to the Ministry of Ecological Transition.
The most popular are air-to-air heat pumps, which produce forced air using refrigerant fluids and an external station that extracts calories from the air.
Le Bien Public