" We can't [...] warm it up to full capacity of the terraces in the middle of winter when it is zero degree for the simple pleasure of drinking his coffee on the terrace with hot. "The minister of the ecological Transition, Barbara Pompili, announced on Monday 27 July the ban of heated terraces in the spring of 2021, after the next winter. Criticized by restorers, this measure proposed by the 'convention' for the climate, chosen by Emmanuel Macron and validated by the council of defense green, should according to the minister " to put an end to practices which are aberrations and ecological that lead to over-consumption completely unjustified power."
The debate on the ecological impact of the heated terraces is not new. In 2008, the deputies had filed a bill to prohibit the braziers, these "parasol heaters" gas-powered. Already at that time, the idea had aroused the wrath of the professionals and had been rejected by the deputies. Since then, only a few cities had taken the plunge, including Thonon-les-Bains (Haute-Savoie) in 2012 and Rennes (Ille-et-Vilaine) in the beginning of 2020.
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The carbon footprint of the three towers of the world car
If the waste energy to heat the exterior is indisputable, what is the real ecological footprint of heated terraces ? In 2009, the consulting firm Carbone 4 was launched in the calculation, reports Le Figaro. In eight hours of operation only, a terrace equipped with four braziers was polluting as much as a trip of 350 miles by car.
last January, Thierry Salomon, engineer in energy and the co-founder of the association négaWatt has also made the calculation, taking for example a terrace of 15 meters long and 5 wide. Equipped with five braziers lit from 8 hours to 22 hours each day, from mid-November to mid-march, it emits a 13.7 tonnes of CO2 per winter, what to do three times around the earth by car !
And for the same terrace, heated pool this time, ten heaters, electric radiant infrared, on the same schedule, and during the same period, the power consumption is equivalent to 25 to 200 kW. This is the average annual consumption of nine families, " notes the engineer. For Francis Pena, president of the Union des métiers et des industries de l'hotellerie (Umih) of Ille-et-Vilaine, these calculations clearly show : "The ecological impact is too strong for a small trickle of hot air at the top of the head for his coffee. "
