Energy and Insulation help.?

1, Yes, it slows down absorption of heat from outside.

Otherwise? Close curtains during sunlight hours. Open doors if in shadow. Shut off all unused appliances, NB not put them to standby.

Insulation slows down the transfer of heat so insulation helps keep houses cool in hot weather by slowing down the inflow of heat from the outside.

There are absorption chillers that use heat to cool down water and a solar based air conditioner can be made with them but they have to be very large to be efficient. It isn't really effective unless you are designing to cool ten houses with one system.

Photovoltaic solar panels can drive a conventional AC that has been converted to DC power in order to avoid the energy loss of the inverter.

The ancient Persians created wind towers which acted like pressure pipettes such that the winds would either pull or push air through the house cooling it. They often had a pond or fountain which could easily cool the moving air another 20 ℉, they also had basements with wells to an underground aquiduct that they had dug from a distant mountain spring, this provided fresh drinking water but also the airflow from the wind tower could pull air up from the aquiduct that had been cooled to about 56 ℉ by the ground, they would often store ice in this basement making it their ice room. They had an ingenious way of making ice in the desert which involved a trench dug such that the bottom remained in shade most of the time but was open to the dry atmosphere above, wate in this trench would form a layer of ice on top which they harvested to keep in dome shaped ice houses which sold blocks of ice to the public.

The ancient Romans would bury a pipe running some distance to their villas, the distant entry to the pipe would be grated to keep animals out and sheltered to prevent water from entering but was otherwise open to air. The bottoms of the pipe had holes to allow condensate to drain out and of course the entry of the pipe into the villa would also be grated to keep animals out. Then they would have a large chimney where they would have a V shaped section facing south painted black so the Sun would heat the air in the chimney causing the air to rise, the rising air would pull air in through the underground pipes which would cool the air to about 56 ℉ to cool the villa.

The ancient Indians would have reflecting ponds and construct their windows such to draw air across the ponds before entering the homes. They also had terra-cotta urns in which they kept wate and would place hay in the water giving it an area to evaporate from.

A camping guide I once came across as a child showed a box frame that you hung from a tree, the sides of the box would be covered in canvas kept damp by a tray of water in the roof of the box. The evaporation from the canvas kept the interior of the box cold for food storage.

As a university student working out in an oil field, I was invited to one of the oil workers mobile home to meet his wife and children. It was a hot summer and it was hot in the tin mobile home. His wife said that they really needed to get an air conditioner because the children were turning into prunes with her giving them cold baths all the time. I asked if they paid for their water by the number of taps they had or by the meter, taps were still common back then. They were on taps so I suggested he put a lawn sprinkler on his roof. He did just that and the temperature quickly dropped to a comfortable level. He mentioned "This is how we keep the chemical tanks cold isn't yet" and I said "Yup".

In Nuclear fusion, a small amount of matter turns into energy and given off as heat and radiation. We can capture this energy such as to heat water to steam to run turbines or we can just let it radiate away. Hence the energy loss has more to do with what we do with the energy than it does with a process of loss.