eli5 What is it that makes air conditioning more challenging than heating?
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Heat (Or more technically, thermal energy) is very easy to make. All you need to do is burn something, or run an electric current through something. On the other hand, heat is very hard to get rid of. There are some chemical reactions that reduce temperature, but they’re not practical to use on a large scale in the same way you can use, say, the reaction of natural gas with oxygen in furnaces to heat buildings. Instead, you usually have to move the heat somewhere else. Air conditioners are machines that move thermal energy from inside a building to outside a building, and moving that energy requires more complicated machinery.
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