Rattle And Hum: Air-conditioning

Could you live without air-conditioning in the heat of a Mallorcan summer? Many make do without it. Like me. I rarely even put it on in the car. To some extent, it has to do with home design and situation, especially the interaction of the position of the sun during the day and any shielding, such as an intervening terrace roof. But even without the influence of direct sunlight, the temperatures are high.

Air-con is hardly cheap to run. It can also be expensive to install. A restaurant owner recently explained to me that a new system had set him back 50,000 euros. That's a lot of lunches and dinners to be sold. Home units may not come to anything like this amount, but neither are they inexpensive.

Somewhere still lurking in the Wacky Department of the Spanish Government is a proposal for temperatures in bars and restaurants, one that would also insist on doors being closed and operated automatically, in order to limit changes to temperatures inside. The proposal was that interior temperatures would not be lower than 26 degrees (79 Fahrenheit) during the summer months. It was and is a mad proposal, but the thinking behind it was to conserve energy and to be environmentally friendly. It is still possible that it might actually be passed into law, at a stroke rendering air-con units more or less redundant. That it seems to have been put on the back burner, so to speak, probably has more to do with the politics of the smoking ban than any desire to save the planet.

Air-con has become pretty much de rigueur for bars and for hotels. Its presence forms part of the promotional mix. "We have air-conditioning." But not all hotels do, especially the older stock. I am led to believe that Bellevue - all 1400 plus apartments of it - could finally be kitted out with air-con. The new owners have an air-con company in their portfolio. It would still represent a massive investment, even given some favourable inter-company transfer pricing, to say nothing of the need for a dedicated system of power generation and also the charges to the guests.

In 2003, the summer of outrageous heat, the power system in Mallorca gave up one day in August. The outage lasted for up to eleven or twelve hours in parts of the island. We are told that there is plenty of capacity now to meet demand, but just think about the level of supply - for all those hotels, restaurants, shops, homes and everything else. One can argue that demand for electricity is very much lower in winter, thanks to all those cold hotels being closed. Open them all up and the gross demand for energy on the island would be significantly greater than it currently is. Perhaps this is a good reason for there only being limited winter tourism.

Air-con units and the demand for electricity have now moved into overdrive if not overload, but the temperatures are still not particularly excessive, despite an average two-degree above normal for the start of July. The fear is that, somewhere down the line, temperatures will become excessive and normal. The demand would be colossal.

The good news is that the island's power stations now have capacity, at least for current needs and a foreseeable future not sent haywire through climate change. The new one in Palma, that was opened in 2006, should be capable of handling estimated increases in demand of up to 6% per year. The growth in demand had actually gone up by a third in the five years before the plant started operating. The arrival of natural gas should be an advantage, albeit not to the plant in Alcúdia, which is coal-fired and which remains a bone of contention for environmentalists - Greenpeace have, in the past, tried to stop the shipping of coal to Mallorca.

The answer to the original question is almost certainly no. No you couldn't live without air-conditioning, and it may be that air-con becomes a matter of life or death, if we are to believe the predictions as to temperature rise. For now though, you can be sure that there will not be a collapse of the power system and that the air-con unit can rattle and hum away, racking up the electricity bill. There again, you could always keep the windows open. Or could you? Some would argue that an open window just lets in warm air, while at night in fly the mosquitoes. And then there is always that mad proposal. To air-con or not to air-con? Who'd be one who wants to save the planet?


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.