I'm sure you could get enough mechanical energy to sharpen any Leatherman.
Posted on 01/02/2008 2:51:34 PM PST by fishhound
SCHARWOUDE (NETHERLANDS): If you've ever blistered your bare feet on a hot road you know that asphalt absorbs the Sun's energy. A Dutch company is now siphoning heat from roads and parking lots to heat homes and offices.
As climate change rises on the international agenda, the system built by the civil engineering firm, Ooms Avenhorn Holding BV, doesn't look as wacky as it might have 10 years ago when first conceived.
Solar energy collected from a 200-yard stretch of road and a small parking lot helps heat a 70-unit four-story apartment building in the northern village of Avenhorn. An industrial park of some 160,000 square feet in the nearby city of Hoorn is kept warm in winter with the help of heat stored during the summer from 36,000 square feet of pavement. The runways of a Dutch air force base in the south supply heat for its hangar.
And all that under normally cloudy Dutch skies, with only a few days a year of truly sweltering temperatures.
The Road Energy System is one of the more unusual ways scientists and engineers are trying to harness the power of the sun, the single most plentiful, reliable, accessible and inexhaustible source of renewable energy — radiating to earth more watts in one hour than the world can use in a whole year.
But today, solar power provides just 0.04% of global energy, held back by high production costs and low efficiency rates. Solar advocates say that will change within a few years.
Other renewable sources have drawbacks: Not every place is breezy enough for wind turbines; waves and tides are good only for coastal regions; hydroelectricity requires rivers and increasingly objectionable dams; biofuels take up land once used solely for food crops. "But solar falls everywhere," says Patrick Mazza, of Climate Solutions, a consultancy group in Seattle, Washington. Compared with other energy sources, "solar comes out as the one with the real heavy lift. It's the one we really need to get at," he said.
Ooms' thermal energy system is actually a spin-off from attempts to reduce road maintenance and costs. A latticework of flexible pipes, held in place by a grid, is covered over by asphalt, which magnifies the sun's thermal power. As water in the pipes is heated, it is pumped deep under the ground to natural aquifers where it maintains a fairly constant temperature of about 20° C. The heated water can be retrieved months later to keep the road surface ice-free in winter.
but what need will there be for heat when globe warms?
It’s an interesting idea. You could use the concept for cooling, perhaps: consider those natural gas-powered ammonia refrigerators you see in camping trailers....
But today, solar power provides just 0.04% of global energy
It’s -11 and the sun has not bee seen for two months. If we put a few yards of asphalt in the yard would the house be warmer?
make those arabs cry
Cool, adding more parking lots is now Green!!! We need more development!
What do you call it when a donkey makes a mistake?
Asphalt
It could be, depends where you live.
Here in CO I blew the snow off the driveway today, and even though the sun was behind the clouds the asphalt portion of the driveway got the last of the snow melted off. Even some of the concrete got the snow melted.
Whether it would make economic sense to transfer the heat to your home is another question.
It’s not that the sun is behind the clouds. It’s not making it over the trees.
Pave Paradise
PAHS for instance, has you build an earth-bermed house, the earth covered by a waterproof membrane. Then you store heat in the dirt during the summer, and extract it for your use during the summer.
Solar power may not be the best option if you ever wanted to get off the grid.)
One of these years I’m going to get a well drill and put down about ten thousand holes in this permafrost and set thermocouples that will work with one polarity in summer and reverse polarity in winter. The plus is that when it is colder than cold, when it is really cold the system would put out the most electricity and heaters inside the building the most heat.
Quiet! Someone may read that and figure out the carbon footprint!
Solar works fine in the summer when there is sun all the time including at night and you don’t need it although it would do to recharge the laptop and the cellphone. That covers about four months leaving just eight months to deal with.
It’s not making it over the trees: OK, you’ve got a problem.
Even here in CO, where a couple minutes of direct sunlight can melt a lot of snow, sun shining through the trees pretty much wipes out any melting. I have a 1/4 mile stretch that runs east/west, with heavy trees immediately on the south. There is no melting going on there, and it won’t until it gets to be about 50 degrees.
Asphalt
*snorfle!*
What do you call cheese that doesn't belong to you?
Nacho cheese.
I'm sure you could get enough mechanical energy to sharpen any Leatherman.
Along about the end of April the most amazing sight appears. Snow that has been piled alongside roads and sidewalks begins to disappear. You can tell when this begins because the dirt appears on the surface. There is no melting or other obvious reason for the snow to be going away. Later it does begin to melt and then we get some flooding which we call breakup and we get swampy for a while. The sun also appears and gives off sensible warmth for the first time in six months and might be responsible for the disappearance of the snow although this is not clearly certain.
HMMMMM with all the Global Warming Whackos present, this may be a good pitch for selling asphalt driveways — although it is hard (for me) to sell something that one doesn’t believe in.....
Sublimation, solids changing directly to a gas. That's what happens here in CO and usually sends up producing a very cloudy day, like today, when the moisture hits the coler upper layer and form into vapor.
Not fair! You're funning me, I'm too tired from blowing snow to notice!
I finally clicked on your home page.
Alaska.
Hm, solar energywise, I think you might be left out in the cold.
Sure would like to visit there sometime though.
The best time is August. Japanese come here Oct - March to see the Aurora, so they claim, but thousands come. They charter tour jets, which is kind of heavy tourism.
Nice!
Actually, it might! Asphalt emits tremendous radiant heat.
Who knows, there might be a use for paving a strip near the house on the southern exposure and letting it radiate into the house.
Ha.
Asphalt is made from petroleum.
What it does is absorb heat in summer and melt permafrost underneath so the road collapses year by year.
But the best way to get off the grid is to use a combination of alternate passive and active sources. If solar could be part of that mix, great.
I wouldn’t drill any hole in meters. We use feet here. Probably fifty feet would get down to a depth of constant temperature.
What they don’t say is how they are storing the heat, where they are storing the heat, what it’s being stored in, and how they are extracting it.
It sounds too good to be true to me.
“.. have a 1/4 mile stretch that runs east/west, with heavy trees immediately on the south.”
Not thinking hard enough. Sounds like firewood to me then that aggravating shading problem goes away.
In most cases you’d be right, but there are a number of us in this development, and we all want to keep the tree cutting along the roads to a minimum, to keep that woodsy atmosphere.
The county wanted to take over the roads, but they require the trees to be cut back to a total width of 60 feet, and we are at about 25 to 30, so we’re keeping it the way it is, maintaining it ourselves.
I have a road grader and I do cut the trees that lean over in heavy snow, and trim branches so they don’t hit the grader cab too much. All in all, the problem of the trees, and admittedly it is a problem, is worth the trade off.
The Reichstag's A/C has been operating on aquifer thermal storage for many years now.
It doesn't matter if you use cubits, palms, feet, or meters. Once a hole is drilled it can be measured. Can you use geothermal heat pumps up in Alaska to any benefit? I assume you are talking about fifty feet depth for constant temperature in regards to using that type of heating/cooling system.
You are exactly correct. I don’t remember exactly when the system went in, but think it was 10 to 13 years ago.
Vail, Aspen, Boulder, and Hollywood have a zero carbon footprint. They all felt so guilty that they bought Allstate Green and felt good about themselves.
The main idea is if the water is stored underground....
In dead winter it is still at a temperature that does not require much energy to heat a building. In the summer the underground water is cooler than what is on the surface.
In winter it will be up enough in temp where it takes less energy to heat it to warming levels.
I think they do the same in the summer to cool houses.
My Uncle’s brother built a system like this for his house and it did provide savings in heating and cooling costs.
I am surprised that the Dutch had a way to keep it really warm for loing periods underground.
Years ago, on the praire, they used to bank (like berms) houses with bails of hay.
A must for the sod houses way back.
I read a story years ago about a guy who continuously ran recycled water over his roof to cool his home. Apparently it worked very well.
Because the pressure differential will be 100% offset by the head pressure to rise 10,000 meters.
It’s not that simple. The trick is to avoid melting the permafrost. This does not use geothermal at all but the temperature delta between air and permafrost. Assume permafrost is about zero degrees, and air is +70 or -40 but normally about zero. The only time you would get electricity is when the air temperature is outside average, either above or below, which means you would get nothing about half the year.
It doesn’t make sense. If it’s warm enough outside to heat up a street enough to warm the inside of a building, it can’t be very damn cold to begin with-—so why the need for asphalt heating? Just construct the BUILDING out of heat absorbing material and skip the middle of the process.
It ain’t rocket science, it’s MORE complex, apparently.
I think they have living experience with the concrete jungle where asphalt collects heat so well that the city is quite a bit warmer than the former farmland. The big buildings generate quite a bit of heat just by sitting with the lights and telephones on and need cooling fairly much. Here in Alaska it is certain that asphalt collects heat and melts permafrost, but only in the couple months of summer. By the time there is enough sun to get some use out of the asphalt in the parking lot you don’t need the heat anyway. But, that’s just local conditions; it might save a few carbon credits in places where they care about that.
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