Geothermal ground source heat pumps. Heating your home from your own back yard!

If you watched our latest video on

geothermal

thermal energy, you know that there is a huge amount of it right under our feet, in the Earth's crust, the challenge is to get to it in a safe, environmentally friendly and economical way to produce a Large amount of energy. The scale transfer of

heat

to a liquid is then converted to steam and moved through a turbine to drive an electrical generator which in turn provides additional power for the national power grids and many of you who watched that video rightly pointed out While large centralized power plants like these are not the only way to use

geothermal

energy for over two decades, systems have now been put into operation that allow individual

home

s and offices to produce their own micro-generated energy from the same

ground

as surrounds the building.

The system is called geothermal

heat

. heat pump, but you've probably heard it more often called a

ground

source

heat pump. I think it's fair to say that the industry has remained fairly low-key over the years and adoption has largely been relatively slow in some parts of the world. due to perceived high upfront costs, but the outlook is now changing rapidly, like almost everything else in these unprecedented times we are all living in, the international energy agency found that nearly 20 million households around the world purchased a pump heat in 2019. And according to an analysis by global consulting firm Market Insights, worldwide sales will exceed $68 billion by 2026 and you and I could benefit from 40 to 50 percent savings in manufacturing costs.

heating

our

home

, plus a considerable government subsidy depending on where you live.

So is it a good idea how it all works and how we can all get a piece of this particular green energy pie? Hello, welcome to all. Energy use in buildings accounts for more than 17 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions and somewhere like the United States, between 50 and 70 percent of all energy used in the home goes to

heating

and refrigeration. Different fossil fuels are used to heat and cool buildings in different parts of the world. Many countries rely heavily on gas, but oil heaters also remain widespread. However, the only constant that can be relied on everywhere in the world is the fact that the temperature of the ground directly below us is much more stable than the temperature of the air around us, which is subject to every whim. weather. more extreme weather conditions, meaning it is generally colder than ambient air during the hottest days of summer and warmer than ambient air during the coldest months and that fundamental physical property is what makes heat

pumps

Geothermal energy is such a simple and effective solution.

This is how they work. A mixture of cold water and antifreeze is pumped through a series of energy-absorbing pipes in the ground that are constantly heated by low-quality heat from the ground as the heated mixture is circulated and then fed into a heat exchanger. , also known as an evaporator, where it transfers its energy. to a secondary fluid with a much lower boiling point and that fluid then becomes a gas that is compressed to further increase its temperature, the hot gas then flows to a condenser where it dumps its energy into a space heating system or even to provide hot water for the building if necessary, once all that energy has been transferred from the gas, it becomes liquid again and passes through an expansion valve at the end of the cycle to reduce its pressure and temperature

back

to the starting point.

It is completely closed loop so the fluid spins and spins absorbing energy from below and pouring it where it is needed, not all houses and buildings have huge expanses of space around them of course in those cases instead of coiling the absorbent pipes of energy in a horizontal arrangement. Approximately one meter underground, you can sink about 100 meters vertically downward, like this system that a company called ONG is installing in California. For every kilowatt of energy consumed by the system, four kilowatts of thermal energy are generated, effectively reducing the cost per kilowatt hour in the 75 percent of warmer countries that typically use air conditioning during the summer, the stable temperature of the Ground will actually be lower than the hot summer air and that means the whole cycle can be reversed so that excess heat can be transferred from the ambient air into the building. enters the system and is sent

back

through the cycle to be dumped into the ground through sets of pipes, turning a heating system into a very efficient cooling system, saving 20 to 40 percent in the electricity bill of a traditional air conditioner, in most cases, the ground

source

.

The heat pump is combined with a more traditional water boiler to ensure there is no risk of the house lacking heat during extreme weather events, but even if that boiler is heated with fossil fuels, there is still a large reduction in emissions of CO2 over the life of the installation because the vast majority of the work is done by the heat pump in most of the year and, even better, if the fossil fuel boiler is replaced by an electric boiler fed by an energy tariff renewable, then those CO2 emissions are reduced even more dramatically, which of course is the main goal of the exercise in Sweden, where the northernmost regions are actually located within the Arctic Circle.

Geothermal heat

pumps

have become a standard alternative to district heating in many buildings as homeowners have discovered that installing and operating their own installation is actually cheaper than paying the cost of the communal system according to the department of geology In Sweden in 2016, there were over 300,000 home geothermal heat pump systems in use across the country, most of them using that combination of geothermal heat pump and backup boiler running on the grid. electricity that I mentioned earlier, one of the first challenges of this setup was the demand on the grid during peak usage periods. To optimize cost versus effectiveness, heat pumps were typically sized to provide about half of the energy demand, which is actually about 90 percent. of energy use, but during very cold days, which are not uncommon in Sweden, these combined systems consumed three to four times more energy per degree, as the heat pumps reached their maximum power and the electric boilers were activated, which was causing a very unwanted spike.

There is demand on the national grid, but new heat pump systems are now equipped with very smart inverter technology that can handle full power heating demand and that simple addition has resulted in lower energy bills for the consumer, less marginal demand for electricity and more available capacity on the grid. for distribution to other energy users is generally a much more sustainable solution, it is worth watching Robert Llewellyn's excellent recent video on the Fully Charged channel showing the Moonstone house in the UK, which generates more energy than it uses and, in fact, is equipped with both. horizontal and vertical geothermal heat pump systems according to this article by Molly Lemprier published on the current news website in September 2020 here in the UK, while the decarbonisation of electricity progresses, it seems that the heat, the sector generates around 37 per cent of the UK's total. carbon emissions when industrial processes are added, so Olympia argues that now is the time to act if countries reach their goal of net zero emissions by 2050, but while the technology is now mature and well-tested, governments are not They have been willing to provide the kind of subsidies. and subsidies that are actually needed to drive the transition for the majority of individual national consumers, the power of the fossil fuel lobby remains extremely strong despite the economic blows they have suffered during the global lockdown period, which the industry still receives hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies. and tax breaks to keep their products competitive with established and now cheaper renewable alternatives, such as solar and wind, and exert great influence on legislators to keep renewable incentives to a minimum even though there was a ray of hope in August 2020 when UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced the introduction of Green Homes Grants, a £2 billion fund to boost home improvements, among other technologies, including heat pumps and the government covers up to two-thirds of the cost for six hundred thousand homes.

The Green Home Grant is a down payment. but it has a limit of five thousand pounds, which does not contribute much to the cost of a well installed ground source heat pump system. There is also a parallel scheme in the UK called the Home Renewable Heat Incentive. The RHI is designed to help those installing the requirements. Technologies claim most of the installation cost back over a seven-year period, but if you claim both incentives, the home renewable heat incentive is reduced by the green homes grant amount to avoid what the government Called double financing, the eligibility details and applicable rates are quite complicated, so to help me understand the fine print, I contacted the company that installed the solar energy system at my home in 2017.

They are called ISO Energy and are the UK's most experienced renewable energy system consultants and installers. I asked them to run through some numbers based on my typical three bedroom semi-detached Victorian house with a garden to the rear, firstly I advise them that a horizontal system is not suitable for a small garden like mine so base their numbers. in a well installation, a nine kilowatt system, including the cost of drilling the wells, all internal components and a full size hot water storage tank, from the first survey to full installation and commissioning, costs around £26k, a retrofit here in the UK has reduced VAT rates of five per cent instead of the normal twenty per cent, so we still need to add another thirteen hundred to that to bring the total to just over of twenty-seven thousand, but I also explained that the home renewable heat incentive can make the owner of a A system like this cost up to four thousand pounds a year over the seven years, so we are looking at a payback time of approximately seven years, which is actually a little faster than the payback of the solar energy system I've had since 2017.

The hurdle, of course, is that the homeowner has to pay for the system up front and claim the incentives later, and not many of We have most of $30,000 on a rainy day. These types of incentives will obviously vary depending on the whereabouts. in the world you live in, but the technology has been adopted in almost every corner of the world, in both hot and cold climates, due to its remarkable ability to maintain a stable indoor climate by effectively equalizing air temperatures and ground. The challenge, as always, with a paradigm. Changing technologies like this are the cost of infrastructure investment and, as usual, we encounter the eternal triangle of public perception, business caution and government leadership.

These three things can be a self-reinforcing mechanism or a precarious house of cards if the right level is applied. If a government incentive is implemented, consumers will see the value of the conversion, which will attract more investment in the sector, which will increase competition and reduce prices, which in turn will attract more and more people to buy the systems , and so on. It sounds a little obvious when you say it out loud, doesn't it? But it's not happening fast enough right now and must be accelerated quickly if any chance of meeting the UN's goal of global carbon neutrality by 2050 is to be resisted.

I got opinions on this one or of course if you have any direct experience in installing and running one of these systems, go to the description box below and share

your

thoughts there, that's all for this week thanks to one of our channel sponsors, bjorn johnson, for providing some of the research information for today's video, particularly on the Swedish example and of course to iso Energyfor

your

help with the UK cost examples. Take a quick look at the website and app if you haven't already and I should. just thank some new channel followers who have joined our patreon page since last time with pledges of 10 or more per month.

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