Cooler Heads and Fatter Wallets

It was 105 in Dallas over the weekend.  The quick air conditioning fact of the day - - the United Sates uses more energy for air conditioning than Africa uses for everything else.  After a record hot summer, the spread between our AC and someones "everything else" will have only grown.

Enter Advantix Systems, a firm that makes systems that produce cooler heads that consume 30 to 50% less energy than conventional systems.  My AC unit works like this.  First, cool the air to well below the desired room temperature.  Then, blow it over a metal plate to make the moisture in it condense.  Then, warm the dry air back up to the desired temperature.

Advantix's "liquid desiccant" technology, by contrast passes the air through a brine solution to dehumidify it, without the need to waste energy overcooling it.  Its machines are especially effective in humid places (if climate change produces periods of extreme heat and extreme rainfall at the same time, we will all understand why Houston in August is one of Dante's Rings of Hell).  Much of the world's growth is projected to be in humid places.

The idea for the technology, and a great example of the need to take a broad view of innovation in a particular field, came from Israeli brothers who build ice  rinks in the Middle East.  Like all good innovators - - they found that many coolers could not cope well with the humidity there, so they created ones that could.

Advantix and Atlanta seem the perfect fit for a long and expensive August - -