{"id":144317,"date":"2022-08-17T09:23:32","date_gmt":"2022-08-17T14:23:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/is-propane-a-solution-for-more-sustainable-air-conditioning"},"modified":"2022-08-17T09:23:32","modified_gmt":"2022-08-17T14:23:32","slug":"is-propane-a-solution-for-more-sustainable-air-conditioning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/is-propane-a-solution-for-more-sustainable-air-conditioning","title":{"rendered":"Is propane a solution for more sustainable air conditioning?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Current severe heatwaves that will likely increase in severity and frequency in the future are driving a rise in the use of air conditioners, threatening the environment with their high energy consumption and refrigerants with high warming potential. A new study finds that switching to propane as a refrigerant could lessen the global temperature increase from space cooling.<\/p>\n

We spend enormous amounts of energy on fighting off the heat in the summer, or throughout the whole year at lower latitudes\u2014about one-tenth of the total worldwide electricity supply. If current temperature trends continue, the energy demands of space-coolers will more than triple by 2050. Apart from the rise in energy consumption<\/a>, space-coolers also threaten the environment<\/a> in different ways: by using halogenated refrigerants with high global warming<\/a> potential.<\/p>\n

Split-air conditioners (Split ACs) that use an indoor and an outdoor air unit connected by pipes are the most common appliances used for space-cooling. They mostly utilize HCFC-22 and HFC-410 as refrigerants, both of them characterized by a very high global warming potential score, up to 2,256\u2014meaning that they trap up to 2,256 times more heat than carbon dioxide<\/a> over 100 years. Urged by the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, many manufacturers are looking for alternative refrigerants with lower global warming potential scores, such as HFC-32. However, with a global warming potential score of 771, HFC-32 still poses a significant climate hazard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Current severe heatwaves that will likely increase in severity and frequency in the future are driving a rise in the use of air conditioners, threatening the environment with their high energy consumption and refrigerants with high warming potential. A new study finds that switching to propane as a refrigerant could lessen the global temperature increase [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":676,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[493,8,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climatology","category-space","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/676"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}