I recently had a discussion about ACs and how they heat up cities.
Then I found an article about theoretical increase of efficiency of acs by using the heat pulled from a room to run a thermoelectric device and getting some of the energy back that was used in the ac.
I‘ve had this downstream thought many times already: since hot air is basically just energy stored. Could we theoretically pull (all?) the energy from the air (depending on desired temp) to cool it and casually fuel our society’s energy needs?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_Rankine_cycle
That’s basically what this engine cycles doing. It’s taking heat from some source and trying to save as much energy as it can. Looking at efficiencies around 40 to 60%.
The greater the thermal gradient the easier it is to produce useful energy from it.