Uhhh, I don't know about that. You're conflating "less polluting" with "efficient". For heat you literally take a combustible substance, and ignite it. The self-sustaining exothermic reaction is called "fire", and it requires no further input to produce heat - just a means of transferring the heat
You should look it up. I mean energy use. AC uses far less energy than heating.
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
I promise this link is to a research study lol.
This is the pdf: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... AC is 4x more efficient than heating.
To quote: “To the surprise of many, air conditioners are more energy efficient than furnaces or boilers. Another way of stating this is that it takes less energy to cool down an interior space by one degree than to heat it up by one degree.
I guess I hadn't considered the angle of it's harder to add energy to a mass than it is to subtract it. Even if the means to do one is much more complicated than the other.
It is super counterintuitive!
This is the case, because (in layman’s terms) it takes less energy to transfer heat (air conditioners) than to generate heat (furnaces and boilers).” Michael Sivak
Anecdotal and based on only my own house... But I use 2-3x more energy on heating the house in the winter than I do on cooling in the summer.
That can be tricky, though, if you're not accounting for stuff that aids with STAYING cool but not with GETTING WARM. For example, my house has one tiny west facing window, no east facing windows, and is shaded by a couple of large trees.
My house is not shaded. So that should aid in heating in the winter. I will concede that insulation could be a large contributer as well. I think you could logically conclude that cooling 20 degrees is going to take less energy in general than heating up 40 degrees. Would love to see a study lol.
it's just a fact: you can move heat using a heat pump (which an AC is a form of) at rates of up to 600% efficiency, compared to burning natgas or resistive electric heating
Maybe none of us are on the same page with respect to efficiency. I mean - in terms of expense to the end user, and not necessarily in terms of physics, isn't it cheaper to use an exothermic reaction for heat, than it is to use electricity to force air to do something it wouldn't naturally do?
I'm thinking of both how humans came up with fire before written history, but no refrigeration until the 19th century, and how in an electric car, you lose A LOT of energy making heat using electricity in winter.
Converting usable energy into fuel has losses itself, and transporting it represents another energy loss of you sum up all factors. Electric powered AC for both heating and cooling has the least losses. Large power plants are by far the most efficient and the grid has low losses
Wherever fuel is cheaper than electricity it's because of external costs, like distorted energy taxes, large maintenance costs for a poorly managed grid, or subsidies, etc.
No. It is more efficient to move heat than to create it by burning something or through resistive heating. For the same number of joules, an electric heat pump can move up to 6 times as much heat.