Oh please, I needed my daily dose of internet rage and EU hate and here you are with you damn facts.

/s

(Seriously, look at these comments. What is happening to HN? Is this what people do with their free time while their agents are churning?)

It's not exactly the Council of Elrond. It's appropriate for the design to be closer to Barad-dûr than Rivendell.

It would burn less, if not all these abstract architects would sit in old art nouveau buildings near a park, with the AC tastefully hidden in the backyard - and there they sit on the MAC, shitting out these etched waver under the ERM buildings and cities for the rest of us to be miserable in.

Well the Greens in Europe handed Russia leverage thanks to relying on natural gas instead of nuclear, which it opposed (thanks German Greens).

In France these ideologues oppose A/C becauase it's evil: it makes us comfortable when we should be uncomfortable - if we are comfortable in an era of climate change, we'll only make it worse. And it's all America's fault anyway because of their emissions.

When do we vote out ideologues and have logical people in power?

In the past with harmful refrigerants and lack of renewable energy AC simply was not justifiable in most of Europe. Progress on both fronts plus global warming is changing that only recently.

Some of the discussion going online, has asserted that heat related deaths in Europe exceed gun related deaths in the USA by some margin. If true, it has been ignored as a problem for too long.

there is significant resistance to air conditioning in Europe at many levels (all of which are invalid or solvable):

* "not technically feasible" - people talk about old buildings with oddly shaped windows

* "can't afford it" - as you see here. people talk about the units themselves and the electricity bills

* "our infrastructure can't handle it" - this has to do with things like grids overheating, failing

* "our infrastructure can't handle <the regulations>" - things like nuclear reactors in France not allowed to raise the temperature of rivers by another N degrees during a heat wave

* "it's bad for global warming" - a little late for that, probably should save lives first

literally hospitals in europe don't have AC throughout the entire building yet. global warming is really coming at them fast

Most ordinary working people can't afford the cost of installing a system. Even a portable one.

This is a reference to Animal Farm, right?

This exact quote ran through my mind and I was tempted to post it.

It depends on the country. If you live in a place that - traditionally - had only an expected few days of really hot temperatures every summer, it wasn't worth the investment. With climate change, the temperatures are now higher and the heat stretches longer.

When there is not enough AC, people sweat. It’s better for half to sweat to death so the other half can remain frosty.

Historically temperatures above 30C (86F) were rare in Europe, so thats what many ACs are sized for. Now they face 40C (104F), and many AC installations can't keep up

Shutting down AC on floors 1 to 7 likely allows them to get better performance on floors 8 to 13

Normal day to day cooling, I mean, obviously? Like if you have a system designed to operate in 25-30C(normal summer in most of Europe) but then you have a spike of temperatures going to 40C for a few days in a row, it shouldn't really be a surprise the system doesn't work in conditions it wasn't designed for? The compressor overheats and shuts down, especially if it wasn't installed in the shade.

Just like heat pumps for heating in winter are amazing for our regular mild-ish winters, but if you get a really cold spell and it drops to -35C, it's just not going to work at all to a point where it might not even start - you could also say "well what's the point of a heating system that can't heat in extreme cold".

The extreme is the keyword.

Except it wasn't the basement and first floor.

It was the first seven floors. Coincidentally, also the floors most of the higher-ups don't work on. Or at least that's how it's being reported, so I don't think people's outrage is absurd.

Any building with modern (last 100 years) insulation is going to have relatively equal distribution of heat between the floors. Except the bottom floor, where people enter/exit and mix in outside air.

The shutdown began at 4pm on a Friday. So, yes, much of the building was on its way home for the weekend. And the higher floors are mostly allocated to the leadership/commissioners, who are more likely to work after hours.

Now, why can't the building handle running the AC without an emergency shutdown? No clue, seems odd to me, unless there was a neighborhood-wide power issue?

The A/C cannot keep up the load, due to the exteme heat. So they decided to just not cool one part of the building, to be able to keep cooling the other part .. It is now interesting who was in which part ;)

The article indicates they were unable to handle the increased electricity load, which caused blackouts.

Additionally, sometimes unnaturally high temperatures break AC systems put in place with poor planning. This is very common in UK supermarkets every summer.

my guess is that the outdoor AC unit reached its maximum working temperature...

since we're not that used to extreme heat in EU, units with max working temperatures of 45 degrees Celsius are pretty common and the air around the AC unit is warmer than regular outdoors air, doubly so if they're placed on the ground and the glass from the building reflects some additional heat from the sun.

the risk of this was broadcasted in our local news for home AC owners when the forecast reached 40, as lots of apartments have the AC on partly glass-encased balconies, or on walls facing direct sunlight...

Based on the little information provided the AC can't keep up. So they cut off the lower half of the building to provide better cooling to the other half

Seems like power shortages:

>”The European Parliament has also faced blackouts this week due to energy consumption from cranking up its cooling system.”

Presumably the AC systems themselves couldn't operate in that extreme heat. A lot of grocery stores in the UK, which are icy cold usually, had major issues with AC and refrigeration systems failing - I think because a lot of the equipment is on the roof and exposed to the heat.