this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
22 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37717 readers
419 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] MasterBuilder@lemmy.one 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

However you use heat energy to generate other energy, it will not solve the problem of heat being increased in cities. Heat is an end State energy form.

This is why you may have heard the phrase the heat death of the universe. Entropy can be thought of as all energy being converted to heat, evenly distributed in the universe. The best you can do is move the heat elsewhere.

Heat death of the Universe happens when the heat is evenly distributed and there's no way to move it to produce other forms of energy, like electricity.

Theoretically, heat can be turned into matter per Einstein, but we haven't figured that out yet.

[–] Haui@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That was quite an awesome read. Thank you very much! :)

[–] MasterBuilder@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

You are welcome! You're making me blush.