this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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Would you say the same about places where it gets well below freezing in the winter?
Edit: Many older houses don't have AC in Vegas. They use evaporative cooling mostly.
It’s easier and more efficient to wrap yourself up with blankets and covers and use minimal heating (with decent home insulation) to warm yourself up than it is to cool down when you are too hot.
At an individual level sure, it's easy to throw on a blanket when it's cold. But at a household level, much more energy is used to heat homes.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-10/why-we-always-fight-over-air-conditioning
Interesting article!
Its pretty US centric though so I think one would have to contrast that against the UK and Europe which generally has homes that are brick and concrete rather than lumber, we also have (I believe) tighter insulation regulations and - just generally - vastly smaller homes.
I think if US houses were built to European regs and sizes then the numbers would look much different.
Also, most existing homes were built when energy was very nearly free, so that there was no incentive to be efficient.