JOYFUL PIECE #30

Yes, we can decarbonize our buildings.

Logo for renewable energies (solar energy, bio-energy, energy of water, wind energy) by German graphic designer and art director Melanie Maecker-Tursun from Hamburg. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

For a long time, mankind has been drawing energy from naturally hot underground sources, such as inherently hot springs and rocks in the earths’ crust. That has saved considerable money over heating with electricity or fossil fuels. The process is called geothermal heating.

Nowadays, institutions, such as colleges and universities are taking these concepts further, by utilizing geoexchange to decarbonize their energy usage. They use water to collect the heat from buildings on summer days and send the water very deep underground, warming the earth. The water does not disperse into the ground because it travels within a piping system that includes large cold and hot water storage tanks. In winter, the warm water is retrieved to warm building spaces. This practice is rapidly growing as institutions prove to themselves the cost and carbon footprint reductions from geoexchange.

The geoexchange process is described in further detail in this New York Times story, To Slash Carbon Emissions, Colleges Are Digging Really Deep.

The political season is ramping up and those who stand to benefit by selling fossil fuels to heat buildings are distributing misinformation. Politicians looking to further their tenure frequently support those folks in exchange for hefty donations. But we can never lose hope. The story here is that big savings in energy bills and reduction in greenhouse gases can and are being achieved through geoexchange. And this is a victory in our struggle to extricate our planet from its global warming dilemma— it is cause for joy.

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