Ground-source heat pump systems are one of the most efficient ways to do climate control, but digging the wells can be prohibitively expensive for the individual citizen. What if you could do it at a larger scale?
Starting with a pilot to serve 37 commercial and residential buildings in Framingham, MA, Eversource is using its experience with natural gas drilling and pipe to serve up a lower carbon way to heat and cool this neighborhood. While district heating via geothermal has precedents elsewhere in the country, Boise is a notable example, it has remained a somewhat niche technology. Once networked, excess heat from one location can be used elsewhere in the system, like data centers or industrial facilities being used to heat homes in the winter.
As gas utilities look to transition away from fossil fuels, their existing knowledge base is a perfect fit for geothermal, but there are some regulatory hurdles. Six states have passed laws allowing natural gas utilities to expand beyond just gas, and bills have been filed in six more. This will likely accelerate with the formation of the Utility Networked Geothermal Collaborative which includes many utilities including giants like Dominion Energy who are looking to expand their energy portfolios.
If you want to dig more into district heating systems or geothermal energy, we’ve covered cogeneration from power plants to serve up the heat instead, doing it with wind, or even using old coal mines for geothermal heat.
A University in my city uses waste heat from a data center to heat an academic building across the street.
“instead of upgrading they’re CPUs to newer, more efficient models”
We are waaay past the point where CPUs advance enough that upgrading aggressively makes any significant difference in terms of power efficiency. Most university data centers are upgraded relatively rapidly, too.
“As a car mechanic, welder and metalworker I think 99% academics”
weird, I must know a ton of the 1% then, cuz I literally did everything you listed myself within the past week
although I will full on admit I can’t friggin’ weld, it’s been on my to-do list to learn for years now. Sigh.
Replacing a PC would cost 4-5 years of CO2 emissions; for what?
Let us say for 25% improvement of an already four-year-old system. Anyone can feasibly justify a decade till decommissioning.
Then you have 2 weeks to decommission and famously by Elon 2 weeks to commission a new one.
https://eridirect.com/blog/2024/01/the-lifecycle-of-servers-knowing-when-and-how-to-decommission/
You know what you know, and you make glaring assumptions about what others know and do not know. Dunning-Kruger much?
If the CPU is being used for useful work then it’s still practically an over 100% efficient heater.
I’d rather use old tech for scientific research if the heat goes to something useful than throw them away.
“I think 99% academics are idiots”
MAGA has entered the chat. These ‘idiots’ built the modern world including the equipment you use and the vehicles you mend. Without universities and schools and academics you would still be mending wooden carts and s&&ting in a can out back…
Leave Donald alone! ﷽
If it was Biden/Harris winning elections now you’d have Afghanistan 2.0 with NATO soldiers bleeding out in trenches somewhere in east Ukraine, fighting for the most corrupt country in Europe. Thanks to Trump war in Ukraine will be over soon and reconstruction will begin.
It looks like Eversource is taking all the financial risk for this project. Good for them. I’ll bet they’re going to lose a bundle of money when the equipment wears out and starts failing in 5 or 10 years.
Why are we still using the term “fossil fuels” on this site? That misnomer has been debunked long ago. The conditions to form those hydrocarbon chains exist nowhere near the depth we find them at and the likely source is deep within the mantle (which would inconveniently label these “fossil fuels” as renewable energy).
Furthermore… Sure… These heat pumps are more efficient for cooling… But heating? Anyone who uses a heat pump in a colder climate (which is around half of the united states and a majority of north america) knows that in order for these systems to heat in these cold climates you would need so much ground capacity that even with multiple residential boreholes or a very large closed loop you STILL need tens of kilowatts of electric heat to augment it… Effectively rendering it as a very inefficient way to heat.
Lol.
Now if could just tap into Yellowstone park, where the heat is near the surface :) …
Hopefully we can now get more gas turbines, coal plants, nuclear sites on line to get us a steady supply of reliable energy … while we wait for the invention of a truly reliable green energy source for power like Dilithium crystals to control matter-antimatter reactors…
(Citation Needed)
Source please – and weren’t quite some fossiles found in coalbeds / coal stratum?
With
and
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel respectively
it sounds to me like the name fits perfectly. They are obtained “by digging” (some literally other only kinda) and are technically “traces of any once-living things”.
still a lot more effective than resistive heating.
And from what I can find in a short search with outside air temperatures between -15 and 35°C the overall efficiency of a heat pump is still between 2,5 and 3,5 times the electrical energy (air as external heat source).
https://www.energie-experten.org/heizung/waermepumpe/waermepumpenheizung/wirkungsgrad#c45382
Even with a temperature difference of 100K between “outside” and “inside” heat pumps still deliver 2-times the heat.
“Source please”
nonono, oh dear god you don’t want those links
seriously actually watching or reading those videos/links should have a disclaimers about your health, the only possible result is you come out of them dumber
Well, I did search a bit and and the term “fossile fuel” is maybe kinda technically a misnomer – but that part doesn’t really make a difference – it’s just the the term got a new meaning.
The other part
is a different story I didn’t even try to look up. And I guess your assessment is probably accurate for “these” claims.
Look up “abiotic oil”. Everyone researching it in the past has been bought out or shut down. The only ones that continued the research were the Russians/Ukranians and supposedly Russia has had great success with selecting drilling fields using this theory as opposed to the biotic oil theory.
The problem with geothermal is the cost of labor to drill the boreholes. Boreholes are by far the most efficient, unless you have a whole bunch of land behind your house that you can lay a ton of pipe in. Then, after all that effort, the discussion of “what is the lifespan of this system” comes into play. Most will claim 25 years, but realistically you start to see significant maintenance concerns after 15 years. If we had a cheap way to drill boreholes, and a highly reliable, low cost and highly conductive(thermally) loop we could install, geothermal could be great. Unfortunately due to these concerns instead it’s just for rich people who want better efficiency for their A/C I guess…
Luckily, many people live in temperate climates where you maybe get one or two weeks of frost a year.
A good heat pump manufacturer also has a COP curve in the product data, showing how much heat you can expect with which ground or air temperature. You have to choose the product that you need for your specific purpose.
Even a modern air-source heat pump has a COP high enough that you’d be better off burning fuel to generate electricity to run the heat pump. Even in cases where it gets super-cold the dropping efficiency won’t matter because integrated over the year, you’d still win.
From a pure theory (Carnot) standpoint you’d always win: assuming even a crap electric efficiency of 33% (which requires a COPh of 3) you’d hit that still way into negative temperatures. It’s just practical concerns that limit you, and you’re still decently efficient even then (like a COPh of 2 down to -20 C): integrate over the year and it’s a win.
But once you factor in ground source… it’s just a straight win.
The “you need huge loops!” is just silly: the amount of heat you need to maintain temperature in a house is a function of how well insulated it is, and that wins with any technology. Saying “we can’t use heat pumps in this climate because our houses are insulated like garbage” is, uh, not really a strong point.
Nonsense. Of course nothing is renewable, the sun will burn out eventually. But let’s look at an example that makes the distinction really obvious. You can burn wood from trees that you grew earlier in your own life, and that makes sense to call renewable. You can burn peat, and it will very very slowly regrow using the co2 from the atmosphere, apparently at about 1mm per year. So if you own many square miles of peat bog, maybe you could harvest 1mm each year to get you through the winter. I doubt anyone’s doing that, but that shows what it takes to make peat renewable. Then there’s coal and other fossil fuels. I don’t think there’s anybody who can reasonably claim that their source of fossil fuel is being naturally renewed from the atmosphere somehow. They’re digging for it, it’s getting burnt, and it’s not going back in the hole.
As for heat pumps: “A few hundred feet below ground, the temperature is a constant 55 degrees Fahrenheit.” is what they say about the location they’re using, but let’s say their ground loop really isn’t big enough and every time there’s a cold day and you load the system the earth around the loop gets colder and colder until it’s colder than the air temperature. Well if that’s the case, maybe you should have an air loop hooked up. Then if the air really is somehow better you can use that. It’s just that these things are supposed to be designed with way more thermal mass than that, so that on the days you really need the heat because the air is very cold, the ground won’t be as cold as the air is, even if it’s colder than the natural cave temperature. If a loop was so small that it was useless in the cold, it’d struggle to air condition too because the ground would contrawise be way warmer than the ambient air if you used it much. Anyway, these heat pumps are getting good enough at working down to pretty cold temperatures, so there’s no reason you would be forced to switch to resistive heat. I actually found I needed barely more heat than what a 1-ton mini split could produce on a windy 20-ish degree day in a somewhat poorly insulated house, and that was air sourced.
As for your apparent ignorance that there’s anything in north america but canadians and new yorkers… lol.
get rekt scrub
Damn right! Sounds like communism.
What’s wrong with communism?
About 50M people killed, and 160M more injured, maimed, tortured etc.
Nazis killed only 6M jews, communists did almost 10x that and yet stupid children are wearing LGBT rainbow and CCCP flags. Sometimes I want to go outside and just shoot them but I don’t want to spend life in prison.
There should be zero mercy for anyone who propagates nazism and communism. Period.
was that communism or a dictatorship declaring itself communistic?…
How many millions of people did “the communism” on Cuba kill?
And why TF are there so many invisible characters in your words (killed, injured & tortured)? Copy Pasta and/or bot work?
This is how your shit looks once copied back and forth through a simple text editor in ANSI mode:
Perhaps it’s easier for you to state what you believe is right with communism?
“…..no Mr.Green…communism was just a red herring….” (Clue the movie – 1985)
Communism is like: Give me your watch, we will tell the time if you want to know!
Dude, right? Wishful thinking and misinformation go hand-in-hand.
Sadly, it’s probably lots of my countrymen – being informed takes effort and a willingness to admit you were wrong. Alternately, a willingness to admit that people who actually study a topic might know more than you. Falling bark on stereotype is so easy!
No need to admit you were wrong. Just admit you were mislead.
Oh no, you can’t report people. Boo hoo. Go concern-troll somewhere else.
Its fine, don’t let it get to you. It may look unhelpful and rude at a glance but personal attacks are very rare here (don’t believe me? go through comments on other posts, I’ll admit this one has quite a few). Most commenters usually critique the subject matter, with barely anything said about the “person” in question.
I actually find hackaday comment section one of the best in class (besides maybe uber niche forums). And the occasional rudeness? Well let’s just say you can’t get multiple subject experts in one place without some friction. But I will still take it any day over reading most other “tech” related websites.
You must be new here. Don’t you remember how they cried about “not very nice comments” and when people pointed out they’re basicaly soviets they started deleting ALL criticism.
I’ve lived on a housing estate with a similar central heating system. It was terrible – frequently broke down, the company managing it was incapable of fixing it in a timely fashion and hundreds of people were often left without heating or hot water for days or weeks with no power to resolve the issue themselves.
I lived in student housing with central heating and whatnot and it worked perfectly fine for years.
Only once was it shut down for more complicated maintenance (planned and announced).
….
Yeah, generalizing from one data point is great. /S
or two data points, it seems.
two data points?
why minimize others shared experiences?
The U.S. Department of Energy’s CHP Installation Database lists 281 colleges and universities that use combined heat and power (CHP) systems.
There are countless other universities laden with steam tunnels who also use chiller towers for their campus cooling.
Detroit, New york city, Boston and Philadelphia pump steam to entire sections of their downtown corridors to heat buildings as well.
Is that enough data points for you?
Um, I’m not minimizing the experience of others. Quite the opposite. I’m pointing out the hypocrisy of accusing someone of “generalizing from one data point” while doing the exact same thing themselves.
As in, “generalizing from one data point is great/s (but from my one data point is just fine)”
I come here specifically to see alternate views. Maybe I learn some stuff. It is fun.
I’d suggest reading my comment again, I generalised nothing. I posted about my experience with such a setup and I made no comment about such systems in the round. It highlights a possible downside, I’m glad you have never had to endure this.
/NOTS
“I’d suggest YOU read my comment again, I didn’t claim YOU generalized anything…”
Was it not a reasonable assumption of mine that you at least tried to generalize? You didn’t finish your OP with any conclusion in either way (generalization VS. just my experience / single data point).
“I just stated that generalizations in general are a bad idea” – at least I can now claim that.
I always wondered why we don’t integrate heating and cooling systems on a building level.
My fridge needs moderate cold, my freezer needs a lot of cold but is very well insulated. Yet my under-sink boiler needs heat. It would be nice to have a whole-house heatpump based heating/cooling system that can transfer heat from one place to another. Maybe even pre-heat an oven and then recycling the heat afterwards. Are there technical limitations to doing this?
Similarly, solar panels are more efficient when cool, I would love to be able to heat parts of my home by cooling down rooftop solar, though I’m not sure how well that would work in snowy/frosty areas
There are panels that incorporate a cooling loop. More complex and expensive naturally.
Here’s a diy sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmckigvz7Hg
But if you want to use the heat Pump for cooling this is probably not too great for the panels, especially in Summer…
Ideally you’d run water through the panels to pull out heat and then dump that into your house hot water heater.
As OP was talking about, we have places in our house that always want to be either hotter colder than anbient, and it would rock to just push heat around rather than having to locally create it.
I already do that with my fridge. In the winter it dumps its waste heat into my kitchen, helping to warm my house. In the summer I let it dump its waste heat into my kitchen, making it more efficient than trying to pump heat into the hotter outdoor temperatures.
And all that is done by a self-contained appliance that’s easy to repair or replace as needed.
I feel like digging and piping to everyone’s house from this facility would be more expensive than just trenching up their back yard.
It might make sense if there were a waste heat source like a data center. I could see where having a mini data-center in every neighborhood would be a good infrastructure step. Bonus that if managed right it would be completely silent regardless of outside temperature.
Microsoft was working on an undersea data center some time ago. This would be basically the same thing.
From what I’ve seen with drinking water pipe infrastructure (and assuming this works the same for this sort of work), the cost per site served is much cheaper because so much of the cost of a drilling project gets tied up in getting the crew and equipment out there in the first place. For water service lines it’s going to be at least twice as much to come out fresh versus doing it when they’re already working on the street.
As they mention in the article, one of the people involved with the effort was quoted $40k to install a system for their individual house in this area. We don’t have final numbers for the total project, but since it sounds like this pilot can be expanded to other homes and businesses in the area after the initial 37, the central well can reach a higher utilization than an individual system would as well.
No system is perfect, but as we see with thermal power plants, bigger sometimes really is better.
Sealab Bitcoin mining?
I lived in a post communism block country where the panel buildings were provided with exactly this type of heating, some of them went underground some of them over ground, all of the 27 building each housing like 48 families were centrally heated. I rarely experienced any downtime, if there was, it was probably maintenance, I’m talking like half a day every 2 or 3 years. Since then 25 years passed, surely engineers could do better than that now days. So yes, thing could work and it is cheap!
For a new residential area, we sometimes have mandatory connections to district heating. Saves a lot of floors pace in the house and gets rid of noisy heat pumps in everyone’s driveway. Makes for much denser packing of the neighborhoods.
A new compromise is a coldish water loop to every house, at maybe 10-20 degC, instead of hot water. Each home would have a smaller water-water heat pump, both for cooling and heating. The central side does not need heating, but can even be a dug up field with water loops as the thermal buffer.
I think this is called cold loop, but this is not the kind of district air conditioning cold loop found in some cities.