By “people” I meant governments, companies or NGOs. Sure a basic AC unit is cheaper for one person, but it seems plausible that a piping system like the one I described would be a cheaper way to cool a large area. Note that AC will cool one person’s house, but contributes a net heating effect to the city.
It’s probably a lot more effective to draw the water from ~10m down; the infrastructure costs are far lower, you’ll probably not need to insulate the water quite so much for coastal regions (to keep it from warming en route to the surface), you won’t need to pump so hard (you won’t have a vertical kilometer of buoyancy for your denser-than-shallower-water to fight).
For coastal regions, this might actually work, though those tend to be relatively moderate to start with (courtesy of the water). It would be a ton of infrastructure to get in installed in more than a small, clustered set of buildings / public property, though. For inland regions, you then need to pump cold (it’s not permitted to warm up much) corrosive (seawater is a pain) water over a long distance in a hot part of the world. Upon its arrival, you still need to get it into the heat exchangers that you have installed wherever financially practical. Then you have to get rid of the resulting slightly-warmer corrosive seawater.
By “people” I meant governments, companies or NGOs. Sure a basic AC unit is cheaper for one person, but it seems plausible that a piping system like the one I described would be a cheaper way to cool a large area. Note that AC will cool one person’s house, but contributes a net heating effect to the city.
It’s probably a lot more effective to draw the water from ~10m down; the infrastructure costs are far lower, you’ll probably not need to insulate the water quite so much for coastal regions (to keep it from warming en route to the surface), you won’t need to pump so hard (you won’t have a vertical kilometer of buoyancy for your denser-than-shallower-water to fight).
For coastal regions, this might actually work, though those tend to be relatively moderate to start with (courtesy of the water). It would be a ton of infrastructure to get in installed in more than a small, clustered set of buildings / public property, though. For inland regions, you then need to pump cold (it’s not permitted to warm up much) corrosive (seawater is a pain) water over a long distance in a hot part of the world. Upon its arrival, you still need to get it into the heat exchangers that you have installed wherever financially practical. Then you have to get rid of the resulting slightly-warmer corrosive seawater.