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Aha, so this initial pocess requires energy. But then once the heat is accumulated somwhere we can harvest it there and run the proces of that energy (minus the effficency loss)
The point is that the heat isn't accumulated, it is dispersed. To the outside environment generally.
Harvesting excess heat from AC might be possible, but only on an industrial scale. The temperature difference is so small it's hard to make it do useful work.
In general, heat is a "high entropy" energy (high disorder), it is hard to convert heat energy to useful work. When doing any kind of work (converting energy from one form to another) there are heat losses.
Really interesting to think of it this way. High disorder/entropy = hard to put it to work.
Yes, but it's not really practical.
There is a limit to the heat gradient an AC can overcome. For example my AC can't go below 16°C . Similarly they won't work when you're trying to move the air to somewhere that is already very hot (so you won't be able to boil water by moving heat with a normal AC).
Also you're usually running an AC when it's already hot. So there really is no need to bother with recovering the heat moved by the AC. If you need warm air there is a bunch of it outside already! And probably also sun, so just use a solar panel.