I honestly have no idea. The one time I tried asking it a question, it asked me to log into my X account, which is about as far as I got.

I’ll say. I’d have expected him to be using Grok, not ChatGPT.

Home ACs are just wasteful.

I don’t know, ours eats 400-500W to cool the entire ground floor, which is a fraction of what the solar panels produce on a sunny day, and a fraction of the surplus energy we have no choice but to sell the utility company for a pittance.
In spring and autumn it can also heat the inside and has a COP of between 4 and 5 then, so much more efficient than a regular electric heater and probably more environmentally friendly than if the central heating would burn more oil - the circulation pump alone uses close to 400W.

Of course we could live without it (people have lived in the house without an A/C before), but it’s much more agreeable like this, not to mention that it allows us to use the winter garden as an office in summer, which has a great view over the garden and allows us to keep an eye on the dogs. There are many much less sensible ways to use that energy than the A/C.

Back to the battery, some EVs can be used as battery storage (vehicle to house, vehicle to grid or vehicle to load). Maybe one of those would make it more viable to have both an EV and storage space for your harvested sun? Not mavy EVs can do it at present, but it may pay to keep an eye on new models.

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.

I’m not sure “cooling degree days” are a good way to measure environmental impact. They neither represent the amount of heat pumped into the atmosphere (as the energy per degree depends on several factors such as mass and heat capacity of the cooled stuff) nor the amount of electricity used (as different A/C’s have wildly different degrees of efficiency) nor the amount of CO2 released (as that depends on how the electricity has been produced).

The power hunger of AI has already been mentioned, so I’m not going to repeat that point, though IMHO it’s by far the bigger issue than residential cooling.

Having said that, if you’re worried about the enviromental impact of your home, the power consumption of a reasonably efficient A/C can easily be offset by just a couple of medium-sized solar panels. Of course both the solar panels and the efficient A/C cost money that not everybody can afford to (or cares to) spend, so you’d have to take cheap and inefficient A/C’s off the market, thus effectively making chilled air a privilege that only the rich can afford. That’d probably lead to lots of heat strokes and other health problems amongst low-income families, so you’d have to weigh the environmental impact of inefficient A/C’s against another rich/poor gap.