CHRIS BARANIUK
The Chinese bus company couldn’t work it out. Some days when its buses merely crawled along Shanghai’s streets, their power consumption would go through the roof. The reason why was a mystery. So, a team from the US firm Montana Technologies flew out to investigate. They started clamping electricity meters onto parts of the bus and soon realized what Yutong Bus, the Chinese company in question, had missed.
“They didn’t instrument air conditioning,” says Matt Jore, CEO of Montana Technologies, explaining how the buses’ AC, used to counter the often hot and humid weather in Shanghai, had a huge effect on power consumption. “The driver would turn the air conditioning on, it would just spike up.”
Whenever anyone, anywhere, reaches for the button that activates air conditioning, or lowers the desired temperature in their room a degree or two, energy use rises. A lot. In humid conditions, air conditioners have to work especially hard—more than half of the energy they consume can go toward dehumidifying the air rather than cooling it. The buses struggling in China’s muggy weather gave Jore and his colleagues an idea. If they could make dehumidification more efficient somehow, then they could make air conditioning as a whole much more efficient, too. They headed back to the US wondering how to make this happen.
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