Indoor heating and cooling systems affect city temperatures

Have you ever thought about the role your home and office heating and cooling systems play during climate change? If your answer is no, you are not alone. Most of us don’t.

We are amusingly oblivious that the warm air we so much enjoy during winters and the cool breeze we desire in hot summers have a tiny part to contribute to the global climate.

It’s time to focus on urban microclimates — a fascinating yet overlooked aspect of climate change. The mundane city infrastructure we interact with daily can significantly alter local climates and eventually our beloved globe.

It’s like throwing a tiny stone in a pond. The ripples may start small, but they grow larger, affecting a much wider area than the stone’s initial impact.

Heating and cooling systems in cities

Leading the pack in this research is the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Under the stewardship of civil and environmental engineering professor Lei Zhao, the team has been investigating the effects of city-level waste heat from our beloved residential and commercial buildings.

“The heat generated from heating and cooling systems is a substantial part of the total heat generated within urban areas,” Zhao said.

“These systems generate a lot of heat that is released into the atmosphere within cities, making them hotter and further increasing the demand for indoor cooling systems, which feeds even more heat into local climates.”

Think of these systems as the culprits that release a lot of heat into the city’s atmosphere, making it uncomfortably hot and thereby increasing everyone’s demand for cooling systems.

That, my friends, is a classic example of a positive physical feedback loop. As we insist on cooling our spaces, we inadvertently feed more and more heat into local climates. Isn’t that a bit counterproductive?

Negative loops to polarized demand

However, the plot thickens. Zhao and his team also discovered an antagonist to this boiling story — the negative feedback loop.

With rising temperatures under climate change, it’s plausible that people would require less heating during winter months.

Translated to city scales, less heating use would mean less heat being released into the city atmosphere, leading to less warming.

But don’t get too comfy just yet. “This process forms a negative physical feedback loop that may dampen the heating demand decrease. But it does not by any means cancel out the positive feedback loop effect,” Zhao warns.

The team’s model hints at a potential polarization of seasonal electricity demand that could unravel a unique set of challenges requiring careful planning.

Feedback loops of heating and cooling systems

The team, led by Zhao, includes experts from various fields. Zhao is part of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment. He also works with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Gies College of Business at Illinois.

The team used a hybrid modeling framework to study global urban heating and cooling energy demand. This framework combines dynamic Earth system modeling with machine learning techniques. Their research addresses the effects of climate change, considering variability and uncertainties.

Their mission? To integrate the effects of positive and negative physical feedback loops into energy projections and ultimately lay the groundwork for more comprehensive climate impact assessment, science-based policymaking and coordination on climate-sensitive energy planning.

Moving forward

Supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and iSEE at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the team is embarking on another exciting journey.

They plan on introducing variables like humidity, building materials, and future climate-mitigating efforts into their models to refine energy-demand projections further.

As we move forward, the importance of such research becomes more evident. The in-depth understanding it provides will play a crucial role in shaping our sustainable energy planning for the future.

Using heating and cooling systems

If there’s one thing to take away from this deep dive, it’s this — every action matters. The way we cool or heat our spaces today might seem insignificant in the larger picture of climate change, but remember the ripples.

Unseen to the eye, these ripples are expanding in the form of local microclimates. The way we plan our cities, consume energy, and mitigate climate impacts can either create ripples of problems or waves of sustainable solutions.

The choice, as always, is ours.

So next time you adjust your thermostat on the heating or cooling systems, take a moment to think – “What ripple am I creating?”.

The study is published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

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