kiwikrasher wrote:
As of 2017, 82% of NZ electricity was produced by renewables, mainly hydro & geothermal, but also solar and wind.
A few of the nordic nations with geothermals have gone down the same route.
It's amazing what can be achieved when you apply your mind to it.
Bloody leftie leaning marxist snowflake liberals and their sodding hippy ways.
Most of the Nordic geothermal energy goes into heat networks for heating homes, not power generation. They also have a lot of small scale CHP systems that run on gas from waste sites. These provide power locally and pump waste heat into the heat network.
They're around 50 years ahead of us as they started in the 70s during the oil crisis. Instead of lowering the price after it ended the Danish government kept it inflated to force other energy alternatives.
We're now doing a similar thing in the UK, but nowhere near the same scale. The Danish have around 93% of homes on heat networks, we have around 3%.
I met a guy who was building houses with heatsinks under them. You didn't need to use fuel to heat the house, you simply got your heat from the reserves in the heat bank or from solar energy.
He reckoned you could build them for £20k extra. He's built a couple of small housing estates with the system in place. The houses sold in no time.
Heatsink or heat pump? Either way, he will have used a heat network to move the heat it produced around the estate. Among other things, we manufacture the interface between the network and the house.
The whole point of a heat network is it removes dependence on a single source of energy like gas. You can inject heat into it from heat pumps, geothermal, anaerobic digestion powered CHP, industrial waste heat, solar, waste heat from steam turbines etc etc etc.
Monty wrote:Heatsink or heat pump? Either way, he will have used a heat network to move the heat it produced around the estate. Among other things, we manufacture the interface between the network and the house.
The whole point of a heat network is it removes dependence on a single source of energy like gas. You can inject heat into it from heat pumps, geothermal, anaerobic digestion powered CHP, industrial waste heat, solar, waste heat from steam turbines etc etc etc.
It's the future, but I am biased.
Ever since, as a child, I saw "that picture" of the planet with a segment cut out to show a cross section of the layres it has seemed to me that there is an almost infinate heat/power source beneath our feet.
I believe some Iclandic towns use it as a communal heating system.?
Monty wrote:Heatsink or heat pump? Either way, he will have used a heat network to move the heat it produced around the estate. Among other things, we manufacture the interface between the network and the house.
The whole point of a heat network is it removes dependence on a single source of energy like gas. You can inject heat into it from heat pumps, geothermal, anaerobic digestion powered CHP, industrial waste heat, solar, waste heat from steam turbines etc etc etc.
It's the future, but I am biased.
Ever since, as a child, I saw "that picture" of the planet with a segment cut out to show a cross section of the layres it has seemed to me that there is an almost infinate heat/power source beneath our feet.
I believe some Iclandic towns use it as a communal heating system.?
They're already doing it in Southampton and we're going to do it on the new Stoke-on-Trent heat network.
Drilling down into the Magma could supply more heat energy than we could conceivably need, and turning that heat energy into electricity (steam power turbines would work) could supply very stable & flexible power solutions, couldn't it.?
You don't need to get to the Magna to get useful heat for a network or generate steam for a turbine. Also, we currently can't drill that deep, think the best we've done is about 7 miles.
It seems that beneath the continents the crust is @ 25 miles deep. Under the oceans this shrinks to about 7 miles.
So that'd probably be the best place to start...you could utilize ocean water to combat the temperatures of drilling into magma, superheating the water into steam, providing on-site fuel for the drill-contraption-thing, etc.
Plus water under pressure heats to insane temperatures before it boils....not sure if that's a drawback or not....??
I'm not so sure why we would spend more time in them seeing as we're supposed to be saving the planet by being greener. Maybe they're suggesting it's so green that we can travel more.
I would have thought that connectivity means there'd be more people working from home or in satellite offices.
I wasn't sure about that, unless the suggestion is we end up car sharing more and vehicles are almost used like a social venue for a small group of friends.
