It’s late July 2024 in Albania. An ever-present heat weighs down the air around you. Summers always get hot, but this time, it feels more draining than before. You’ve cranked the AC in your house, so the inside is safe. One step through those doors, however, and you’re right back to that game of shade-hopping. In contemplating whether or not you should leave the house, all of a sudden, the lights go out. You don’t panic, of course; power outages are not exactly unheard of for you. In fact, you recall many late school nights that saw you toiling over schoolwork under dim candlelight. But make no mistake, this power outage was a serious one. It wasn’t just your neighbourhood this time; it was the whole capital. More than that, the same thing happened in Montenegro, Bosnia, and even parts of Croatia’s coasts.
Those little blackouts during the summer seasons some years back, and this big one in July, all of them are products of an ever-heating climate. It’s quite simple, really. With hotter and hotter summers, we become more and more dependent on individual ACs to cool our homes. Make no mistake—this invention is a miracle that’s allowed us to survive blistering city heatwaves. However, as with any technology, there are drawbacks. For AC, that drawback is power usage. As demand for cooling spikes, it strains a city’s electrical grid. A grid’s capacity can only take so much, and when that limit is exceeded, you encounter those rolling blackouts that are all too familiar to Tirana’s 90’s kids.
The other part of the problem that rose to the surface after July’s mass blackout was that the Balkan region has interconnected power systems. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Interconnectedness allows for these countries to share resources during times of crises and allows for trade under a common energy market. Unfortunately, though, when the whole system is stressed to the point that it cannot keep up pace with energy demands, you get a mass blackout that brings with it some complicated consequences for modern societies.
These consequences can be more dire than one initially expects. We depend on electricity for all facets of our lives. An important facet, like healthcare, for instance. There are health emergencies all over the cities of the world, all of the time. This is especially true during the summer. Think about the increased risk of heatstroke or the greater threat that infectious diseases pose, now being more likely to spread. There’re also newborns that rely on clean and controlled pediatric spaces for healthy development. All of these realities of the summer clash with the acute disruption that a large-scale power outage brings. Responding to these disruptions can be extremely taxing and challenging, especially for developing countries.
Such countries might not have the protocols or capacities needed to respond effectively. In Tirana, for instance, consistent power outages in the past have influenced the filtration systems of pediatric areas of the hospitals. This unclean air has impacted the welfare of pre-term newborns. These stressors have been linked to children developing asthma and other respiratory complications in low-income countries. An even fresher memory for us in Albania is the suffering of Covid two summers back. With no cooling in hospitals during a scorching summer, and with immune systems in overdrive cranking up internal temperatures all the more, the life of Covid patients in Tirana was made very difficult indeed. Heatstroke was a problem to be sure. There comes a point where a body can’t regulate temperature anymore. A quick and efficient response in those cases can save lives.
Ultimately, the challenges faced by increasing temperatures worldwide represent some of the most intimidating behemoths our societies will contend with. Solutions are not easy. Change is not easy. Ever more frequently, we will have to deal with these problems. Capital cities like Tirana have a difficult future in this respect. Better opportunities are attracting rural migrants to such cities, increasing the population, and with it, increasing the energy demands of that city. More than ever, it’s important to look at what can be done by studying what has already worked. There’re a lot of interesting and practical ideas out there.
An ingenious example of fighting urban heat comes from Singapore. Instead of relying on numerous personal AC units scattered throughout residential buildings, Singapore has opted for a city-wide cooling system that runs underground. This is an application of ‘district cooling,’ and it relies on centralised cooling plants that output chilled water. This water scatters through insulated pipes of the underground distribution network of Singapore. The principle is simple: buildings that have collected heat under an unrelenting sun transfer that heat to the cooled water that proliferates through buildings’ air conditioning systems. As the heat exchange process comes to a close, the heated water heads back to the central cooling plant through a different network of pipes, where it’s cooled once again and redistributed. This is done again and again throughout the hot summers of Singapore.
District cooling certainly shows a lot of promise, and other places around the world have already started implementing large-scale projects like that of Singapore. Chicago, for instance, draws cool water from Lake Michigan to cool its downtown area. Toronto is doing something similar. Over in Europe, you have the extensive district cooling system of France, and there’s the Helsinki system in Finland, the systems in Sweden, and so on. Cities in the Middle East also stand as notable examples.
These large-scale projects are very promising but may be difficult and expensive to implement. Thankfully, there’re some other, more low-tech means of fighting the ever-warming climate. If you’ve ever been to Greece, for example, you may have happened upon those white stone houses by the seaside. Not only does the thick stone provide considerable insulation, but painting these buildings white essentially reflects sunlight. This reflective property of paint has spurned the practice of ‘cool roofing,’ a technology that has garnered popularity thanks to its cost-effective and surprising efficiency.
One implementation has been the cool streets project of LA, which has seen the painting of several stretches of road and rooftops. New York has done something similar. Other heat-challenged places like Ahmedabad in India have further demonstrated that this technique is especially worthwhile in low-income housing. Increasing the reflectivity of roofs and urban surfaces can have significant effects in a city, lowering urban temperatures by up to 2 °C. That may not sound like a lot, but this change is comparable to international climate goals aimed at tackling global warming.
Along the reflectivity efforts, there’re plans for increasing the amount of shade in a city. You may have heard of ‘green corridors.’ These are stretches of vegetation that can be planted within urban landscapes, lining a long boulevard, for example. These stretches of trees provide shade and a relief of around 2 °C for city folk. Singapore, once again, gives a beautiful example of this with its Park Connector Network, as well as with its more innovative efforts in green architecture.
There’s a lot of other plans in the works for handling our warming planet, some of which are quite outlandish. There’s the idea to construct a massive sunshade in earth’s orbit. Other theories toy with the idea of inciting volcanic eruptions. This idea came from observing the effects of Mount Pinatubo’s eruption in 1991. The release of sulphur dioxide from that event effectively created a reflective layer that spread across earth’s stratosphere and cooled the entire planet for a time. There’s also the impressive work done by geoengineers towards carbon capture, where some implementations have converted carbon in the atmosphere into volcanic rock.
Altogether, the ideas presented in the previous paragraph are both very ambitious and very complicated. The repercussions of influencing the globe in these ways are difficult to predict. Moreover, a lot of these ideas can be context specific, like the geoengineering one. What’s important above all, though, is that we, as a global community, invest in research that can lead to real-world impact. Human ingenuity does not appear to have a limit. With that, it’s also important to understand and promote what’s already working. District cooling, city greening, reflective paint—all of these are practical examples of what cities like Tirana can do to prevent region-wide blackouts, to lessen the burden on healthcare, and to make living in a modern city during scorching summers tolerable. The citizens of Tirana may not be able to influence their society on a large scale, but for the moment, I think we would be able to take up a brush or two and start painting.
