One twisted thing about cooling and climate change: It’s all a vicious cycle. As temperatures rise, the need for cooling technologies increases. In turn, more fossil-fuel power plants are firing up to meet that demand, turning up the temperature of the planet in the process.
“Cooling degree days” are one measure of the need for additional cooling. Basically, you take a preset baseline temperature and figure out how much the temperature exceeds it. Say the baseline (above which you’d likely need to flip on a cooling device) is 21 °C (70 °F). If the average temperature for a day is 26 °C, that’s five cooling degree days on a single day. Repeat that every day for a month, and you wind up with 150 cooling degree days.
I don’t know if you’ve already heard of them or if they’re even available where you live, but if it’s the cold air that bugs you, there are water-cooled ceiling plates that work just as well as a conventional A/C. An office I used to work at had them and they were lovely. They cost quite a bit more though.
As an alternative if you just want to avoid feeding surplus energy into the grid, what about a battery of 5-20kWh? It could store more energy than the A/C uses during the day, probably costs about the same or less, and you can use that energy at night.
The thing that bothers me most about office AC, is that the air is stale due to poor maintenance. Yes there are regulations against this, but those are not being enforced because that would cost money and hurr-durr stockholders and hurr-durr employers. Home ACs are just wasteful. I live in a neighbourhood that has many many gardens that are fully paved over. In order to counter the heat, each house has several AC units. Dumb fucks.
I installed solar panels 5 years ago. Back then, a home battery was ~€9000 , so not worth it. Currently, a home battery starts at ~€1500 but with pitifully low capacity. There’s currently no real incentive to install these. You may save a bit of money, but at its current rate you would look at a 15 year ROI.
Switching to an EV would be a nice idea for surplus energy, but our anti-environment government has made it very unattractive to buy one, but now I am going off-topic so I’ll save that for another rant.