60,000 cubic meters of crystalline rock
Thanks to a small blurb in New Scientist, I've just read about a "partly solar heated building area" in the wintry town of Anneberg, Sweden.
[Image: Sweden, via Wikipedia].
This particular "building area" consists of 50 residential units – but check out how they'll be heated in the winter: solar-heated water from the summer months will be stored 65 meters underground in "60,000 m3 of crystalline rock," complete with "100 boreholes... fitted with double U-pipes."
As New Scientist explains, that water will be "kept hot by the rock, and can then be pumped back up to heat homes in winter."
This is referred to as "seasonal storage in rock."
Meanwhile, as the rocky matrix itself slowly heats up from years of use, engineers predict a near 70% drop in "conventional heating" bills – as well as in the use of fossil fuels.
Which is only appropriate, as the Swedish government announced last year that they hope "to become the world's first practically oil-free economy."
[Image: Sweden, via Wikipedia].This particular "building area" consists of 50 residential units – but check out how they'll be heated in the winter: solar-heated water from the summer months will be stored 65 meters underground in "60,000 m3 of crystalline rock," complete with "100 boreholes... fitted with double U-pipes."
As New Scientist explains, that water will be "kept hot by the rock, and can then be pumped back up to heat homes in winter."
This is referred to as "seasonal storage in rock."
Meanwhile, as the rocky matrix itself slowly heats up from years of use, engineers predict a near 70% drop in "conventional heating" bills – as well as in the use of fossil fuels.
Which is only appropriate, as the Swedish government announced last year that they hope "to become the world's first practically oil-free economy."
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3 Comments:
Well, Iceland by a wide margin, will be the first oil-free economy. They already started down this path a decade ago and are, by far, the closest nation to being petroleum-free.
Good for Sweden if they also make it, they just don't enjoy the geothermal resources of Iceland.
shows where my mind is, but that map remindes me of the Mull of Kintyre Test: to determine whether a penis was too tumescent for depiction, the British Board of Film Classification used to compare it to the Mull of Kintyre, a peninsula dangling off the west coast of Scotland.
Not sure why they didn't just use Sweden instead.
... something to learn
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