The U.S. is a nation of air-conditioned houses, and this ubiquitous cooling machinery drives an outsize chunk of the country’s electrical demand, especially during heat waves. Now, as utilities scramble to meet even more power demand for AI computing, legacy air-conditioning giant Carrier has launched a new business venture to make regular old HVAC equipment part of the solution.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/carrier-air-conditioning-help-grid
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The U.S. is a nation of air-conditioned houses, and this ubiquitous cooling machinery drives an outsize chunk of the country’s electrical demand, especially during heat waves. Now, as utilities scramble to meet even more power demand for AI computing, legacy air-conditioning giant Carrier has launched a new business venture to make regular old HVAC equipment part of the solution.
“Carrier has realized that home batteries are a much higher-margin business than HVAC equipment”
That’s a better title.
Oh, and with the added benefit that if either fails you’ll replace both.
Interestingly, the (northern) EU has largely always been an ‘airco == bad’ region. Now that gas heating is getting banned, we suddenly embrace airco as the ‘better’ alternative.
I’m not sure why airco and batteries would help a lot, especially in winter, when there isn’t much sun to charge the battery.
In summer, sure.
Keep in mind that batteries have an efficiency of 80% at best, so they will drive up your total energy usage.
I just hope they’re not putting the batteries in the AC unit
I feel like an HVAC integration can be more cheaply done with a properly integrated thermal battery. Think hot water tank that is heated/ cooled at optimal parts of the day.
You know the fun thing with batteries is that as long as you’re plugged into the grid, you can make full use of them from anywhere else in the grid, and there’s no reason to abandon economies of scale and cram it into your house.