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Hong Kong

Hong Kong through the Looking Glass

By Dante Archangeli

A Series on Sustainable Planet, People, and Prosperity

 
Like Alice’s, my world is getting “curiouser and curiouser.

We took off from Tucson at 7:00 Monday morning and landed in Hong Kong  at 9:00 Tuesday evening for the start of a three-year adventure. The flight was timeless hours of shutout sunlight and psychedelic video overdose. There was a futuristic forest planet inhabited by Will Smith as a space general and computer-created sort-of-familiar giant animals, nature-created but stranger-than-fiction Birds of Paradise in a National Geographic documentary, a Hollywood-created Jackie Robinson helping to pave the way for Will’s fictional career, Jay Gatsby in a fantastical New York, and Iron Man keeping the world safe for all of them. Somewhere in all that resonant mess (given my new home) of strange but familiar and unusual but ordinary there was even a reference to James Boswell.

Hong Kong’s Chek Lap Kok airport terminals, modern and glass, could be anywhere in the world except luggage carts are free. The metro is inexpensive, clean, very fast, oh-so quiet, and seamlessly connects to other public transportation modes. Going to the airport you can check in for your flight and check your bags before boarding the 24-minute trip from downtown to the airport. Residential internet service of 300 to 1,000 Mbps is standard. In Tucson our service was only 20, way more expensive, and the fastest available speed was 105.

High-rise buildings are the norm in Honk Kong but they are built using bamboo scaffolding.  With summer high temperatures in the 90s compounded by corresponding humidity (I can’t say it’s a dry heat anymore) energy guzzling window air conditioners (I calculate ours to be about 10 SEER) are ubiquitous. Does room-by-room cooling with low-efficiency equipment use less energy overall than whole-house air conditioning? Our apartment has tankless heaters. But efficiency may be compromised unless the building superintendent can figure out how to get the one for our shower to work properly if the high-volume shower head is delivering water at less than full blast.

Can we learn about sustainability from Hong Kong? Alice’s Duchess said, “Every story has a moral; you just need to be clever enough to find it.” I’ll let you know what I find.

 

 

Dante Archangeli recently moved to Hong Kong from Tucson, Arizona, USA, where he focused on sustainable construction and development. He is an MIT and USC educated project manager, entrepreneur, and builder.

Header photo by 10219, courtesy Pixabay.

  1. Thank you Dante for your interesting and informative post. I wish all the best for you in your new adventure.
    Sincerely,
    Jack

  2. Dante,
    A great start, a bit literate for a blog, but I like it. Have you done the back-of-the-envelope calculations on the cooling of your apartment yet?

    Blair

    1. Hi Blair, Thanks very much for the comment and question. I haven’t done back-of-the envelope cooling calcs but here’s some info on monthly electric use.

      We’ve received two HK electric bills. I’m not 100% sure if the usage reported is in kWh but it seems like it probably is. We used 586 units for the month ending 9/18. I’m guessing the apartment is about 1,400 sf. If 586 is kWh then that would mean we used about .418 kWh / sf for that month (586 kWh / 1400 sf). As a comparison and reality check, in Tucson for June, July, and August we used 2,055, 2,003, and 2,233 kWh each month respectively. If we use the for the average for the period of 2,097 kWh / month that means that we used .499 kWh / sf / mo (2,097 / 4200). So the calculated electric use is in the same ball park for our apartment in HK and our house in Tucson.

      Significant use difference are:
      Tucson includes a swimming pool filter pump and two large food refrigerators, but not water heating, indoor temp was 78 – 80 degrees F
      HK includes tankless water heating but only one small food refrigerator and no swimming pool filter, indoor temp is about 80 – 82 degrees F

      By the way, on the HK Electric bills it says that “Per capita consumption for HK Electric domestic customers 170 units / month” “CO2 emission per unit of electricity consumed 0.79 kg”

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