Long-term thermal storage is something I've been fascinated with the last year or so.
Heat loss inside of dirt is so incredibly slow it's hard to wrap your head around. One fact that I find helps is the fact that after an entire winter of extremely cold temperatures, you only need to go down 10 ft or so before you hit the average annual temperature. 4 months of winter buffered by 10 ft of ground!
Obviously there is incredible potential to this even if you just keep the energy as heat. The amount of electricity we use on heating and air conditioning is huge. If we could just create hot and cold piles or underground wells or something that we could tap into 4 months later when the temperature has changed, you would have completely solved heating and cooling.
Really excited by companies looking into this and wish them the best of luck!
Heat loss inside of dirt is so incredibly slow it's hard to wrap your head around. One fact that I find helps is the fact that after an entire winter of extremely cold temperatures, you only need to go down 10 ft or so before you hit the average annual temperature. 4 months of winter buffered by 10 ft of ground!
Obviously there is incredible potential to this even if you just keep the energy as heat. The amount of electricity we use on heating and air conditioning is huge. If we could just create hot and cold piles or underground wells or something that we could tap into 4 months later when the temperature has changed, you would have completely solved heating and cooling.
Really excited by companies looking into this and wish them the best of luck!