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?
Sad but thanks for letting me know. Makes sense that there is some reason for it dissipating as heat most of the time.
But there are actually studies done to find out if energy can be harvested from the temp differential in acs https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352484722019023
So I suppose there might be some use to it.