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?

  • @MasterBuilder
    5•10 months ago

    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.