The answer is obviously "no" since there are other parts of the world that don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires.
Perhaps what should be more commonly accepted is that the US is a land of great natural beauty! And large tracts of it should be left to nature.
What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the summer? $400?
Where does LA get most of its water? Local sources? I don't think that's the case.
New Orleans is a future Atlantis.
San Francisco is a city built by Monty Python. Don't build it there it'll fall down, but I built it anyway, and it fell down, so I built it again...
The average high temperature in Phoenix in July is 106.5F (41.4C). If you are cooling to 70.0F (21.1C), that's a difference of 36.5F (20.3C).
The average January low in Berlin is 28.0F (-2.2C). If you are heating to 65.0F (18.3C), that's a difference of 37.0F (20.5C).
I feel like many people living in climates that don't require air conditioning have this view that it's fantastically inefficient and wasteful. Depending on how you are heating (e.g. if you are using a gas boiler), cooling can be significantly more efficient per degree of difference. Especially if you don't have to dehumidify the air, as in Phoenix.
So every human in your cold space is 80W fewer watts of energy you need to produce to heat the space. But in a hot space, it’s an extra 80W that needs to be removed.
Add to that all of the appliances in a home. It’s not unusual for a home to be drawing 100W of electricity just keep stuff powered on in standby, and that’s another 100W of “free” heating. All of this is before we get to big ticket items, like hobs, ovens, water heaters etc.
So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space. Simply because all the waste energy created by people living in the space reduces the total heating requirement of the space, but equally increases the cooling requirement of that same space.
All of this is ignoring the fact that it’s easy to create a tiny personal heated environment around an individual (it’s called a woolly jumper). But practically impossible to create a cool individual environment around a person. So in cold spaces you don’t have to heat everything up to same temperature for the space to be perfectly liveable, but when cooling a space, you have to cool everything, regardless of if it’ll impact the comfort of the occupants.
This simply is not true for a furnace or electric resistive heat.
My furnace produces 0.9W of heat for every 1W of energy input. More efficient ones do 0.98, the best you get with electric resistive heat is 1W.
On the other hand my air conditioner moves 3.5W of heat outside for every 1W of energy input.
So you are spot on, in winter temperature deltas are larger, and efficiency goes up.
https://backend.daikincomfort.com/docs/default-source/produc...
There are multiple relevant temperatures for a heat pump, and the pump is more efficient when some of those are higher and some lower. A heat pump has two heat exchangers, one on the inside of the building and one outside. Each of those heat exchangers has two temperatures: the refrigerant loop temperature at that point, and the ambient temperature (air for air source heat pumps, ground for ground source heat pumps). There's also a fifth relevant temperature that has indirect influence: the setpoint (the desired indoor ambient temperature).
Efficiency increases when the temperature delta between the refrigerant and ambient temperatures is higher (both indoor and outdoor). But those temperature deltas vary inversely with the delta between the indoor and outdoor ambient temperatures.
So, in summary:
- Heat pumps get less efficient when the temperature delta between indoor and outdoor temperature is higher.
- They get more efficient when the temperature delta between refrigerant and ambient temperature is higher.
The net effect of this is that heat pumps become less efficient as the temperature becomes hotter outside in the summer and colder outside in the winter.
> plural in form but singular or plural in construction
(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/thermodynamics)
I think American and British English treat words like this differently.
You can also think about it as far as actually moving heat. Cold is the absence of heat, and so when the air is colder, there is less heat moved for the same effort and you have to work harder -- less efficiently -- for the same amount of head to get moved.