Argentina. A group of Argentine students presented a project to modify the "set" of air conditioners with which it would be possible to reduce global energy consumption by 14%, an initiative with which they got into the final stretch of a contest organized by the Center for Collective Intelligence of the American Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The proposal of the "Kiri" team, composed of students from the Technological Institute of Buenos Aires (ITBA), was among the 60 selected out of a total of 500 participants in the "MIT Climate Colab" (as the contest is called in English), which seeks to take advantage of the intelligence of thousands of people around the world to solve the challenge of global climate change. The team is coordinated by engineer Eduardo Fracassi, and its proposal is to modify the type of "seteo" or adjustment of residential air conditioning equipment so that they spend less energy and release into the atmosphere less tons of CO2, one of the greenhouse gases. "Many users are unaware that energy consumption skyrockets exponentially just by changing the temperature setting by a few degrees," explained Aylin Vázquez Chenlo, from the ITBA Bioengineering career, in an interview with the CyTA agency of the Leloir Institute.
The team proposes that when residential air conditioners are used in cooling mode, they have a minimum temperature of 25 degrees instead of the 18 it currently has. The measure would reduce global energy consumption by 14%, a figure that according to the Leloir Institute is equivalent to 30,000 million dollars or the GDP of countries such as Paraguay, Bolivia or Lithuania.
