Could Air-Conditioners Help Cool the Planet?

空调能够让整个星球变冷吗？

正文

Air-conditioning and fans account for（占比例） a full 10 percent of the world's electricity usage. Or put another way, "It's a lot of air you pump around."

空调和风扇占用了全球约10%的用电量，换句话说：“你从周围抽取了大量空气。”

Roland Dittmeyer, a chemical engineer at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, says another thing that takes a lot of pumping air around is carbon capture, because the concentration（浓度） of the CO2 in air is evidently quite low. Even though it’s enough to cause climate change, it’s only 400 parts per million.

德国卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院化学工程师：罗兰·迪特梅尔说：“另一个抽走我们周围大量空气的东西是“碳捕获”，因为现在大气中的二氧化碳浓度虽然足以导致温室效应，但是很显然还是非常低的，只占万分之四。”

So, he says, why not retrofit（改进） air conditioners with modules（组件） that capture carbon? Several companies already make materials that strip carbon dioxide from the air.

所以，他说：“为什么不给空调装上碳捕获组件，让它具有捕获二氧化碳的功能？数个公司已经在制作能够从空气中捕获二氧化碳的材料了”

You'd then need to convert（转换） that captured CO2 into hydrocarbons— an energy-intensive process. But Dittmeyer's vision is that we'd use clean, carbon-free renewable energy to power that step.

然后，能就需要将捕获的二氧化碳转化为碳氢化合物。但是迪特梅尔的愿景是我们能够实现使用清洁，不含碳的可再生能源来提供动力的那一步。

Do this on a large enough scale and you produce significant amounts of this synthetic（合成的）, renewable oil. Dittmeyer and his colleagues calculated that if you outfitted（提供全套设备） the AC system of the Fair Tower, a large skyscraper in Frankfurt, with these carbon-capture devices, the building’s units alone could produce an estimated 15,000 barrels of synthetic oil a year.

如果规模做得做够大的话，就能够生产出相当可观数量的合成油。迪特梅尔和他的同事们经过计算得出，如果给法兰克福摩天大楼商品交易会大厦的空调系统配备这些碳捕获设备，那么每个建筑单位每年就可以生产约15,000桶合成油。

If the idea gets traction（牵引）, it could transform the devices that cool our homes and offices into machines that help cool the planet—or at least stop warming it up while chilling us down.

如果这个想法能够受到推动的话，它能够将我们家里和办公室里的制冷设备转变成可以使整个星球变冷的设备，退一步讲，它也至少能够改变现在温室效应的现状。

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