Re: [106attendees] temperature control and hotel contracts

["Scheffenegger, Richard" <[e-mail]>]

>> It is insane to waste energy and need to bring coats!

> It is even more insane for hundreds of people to step into big metal tubes for several hours as they cross the planet at ~1000kph to arrive at wherever an IETF meeting is being held. Three times a year. That will be a much, much bigger "waste of energy" than some hotel's AC. Though I've not bothered to do the mental arithmetic to check.

Without going into any other arguments, trying here to do a bit of back-of-the-envelope calculation.

In Canada, the A/C requirements for conference rooms are stated to be approximately 15 kW per 200 m2 (in the first reference I could find).

This mostly covers the waste heat carried in by humans and equipment - and scaled to suffice for Canadian summers (with relatively benign temperature differential to the outside).

I would expect that in the tropics, the power demand is primarily driven by the temperature differential, and the latent heat removal of water vapor condensation and less so by the humans in the room. 

My google-foo doesn't give me any readily available ballpark numbers, so let's assume the energy demand triples to ~50 kW per 250m^2.

Total conference room area at an IETF will probably be around 2000-3000 m2, so we "consume" about 400 to 600 kW for one week, or 84 MWh over ~1100 participants -> 76 kWh/per person.

A380 (as an approximation between more efficient 787, and less efficient medium haul planes) emits 75 g/CO2 per passenger per km. 

In Singapore, one kWh carries a load of about 420 g CO2 (https://www.ema.gov.sg/cmsmedia/Publications_and_Statistics/Statistics/18RSU.pdf)

With these ballpark numbers, it is absolutely true that the travel for IETF far outweighs the CO2 footprint of the air conditioning - unless flying in from less than ~400km away. Which is interestingly the same distance, you could travel with directly using the A/C energy in an electric car.

Even if the above rough estimates are off by a bit, the assertion still holds. And electricity can be made renewable much easier than plane travel 😊