Hong Kong’s Air Conditioning Addiction
It was just one night but it seems most people in Hong Kong could not go without air conditioning. Last Wednesday, about 50,000 households switched off their air-con units for Hong Kong’s first No Air Con Night, an event organized by the eco-group Green Sense to raise awareness of the environmental impact of air conditioning.
But for the remaining 2,285,000 homes in the city, it was business as usual.
“I tried to sleep without the A/C on, but it was too noisy to keep the windows open and the room heated up so fast,” one Mongkok resident said.
In just a few decades, Hong Kong has evolved into an air-con dependent city, with most people spending their days in housing estates, shopping malls and office towers that become furnaces without the cooling systems. The dependence continues at night as temperatures soar in our high-rise, heat island homes. So much so that air con accounts for 60 per cent of the city’s power consumption in summer.
When it comes to air conditioning, we seem to have built ourselves into a corner. Now, some are looking for a way out.
“Even in the 1990s, schools were not air conditioned, many buses had no air con and there were not as many shopping malls,” said Gabrielle Ho, the project manager of Green Sense. “Now the first thing people do when they get home is switch on the air con. Everywhere is so air-conditioned, people have gotten used to it.”
