Richard Branson (who asked for UK taxpayer money to repair his private island after hurricane Irma) Has set a climate change challenge:
As the world continues to warm, you can expect more and more folks to be turning to air conditioners to keep their living environments cool and comfortable. And in that sense, this energy-intensive technology will do plenty to exacerbate the very problem it is designed to solve. The Global Cooling Prize is a competition to help stop runaway climate change, by dangling US$3 million in prize money for the development of more energy-efficient cooling solutions.
The Global Cooling Prize is backed by the Indian government among other partners, with Richard Branson taking on the ambassadorial duties.
$3M could keep this site running for some time -- go team SoylentNews!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @01:32AM
What you want is the Sandia cooler.
The prototype is for a CPU, but it works most anywhere you have a fan and some cooling fins. Replace the fan and cooling fins with the all-in-one design of the Sandia cooler, and efficiency improves.
So you'd use at least 2 for an air-conditioning unit, for air on the hot outdoors part and on the cold indoors part. You might add internal ones as well, in the fluid that runs around inside the air-conditioning unit, bringing the total to 4.