Smart heat nets fire the next energy revolution - tech - 15 April 2013 -...

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Smart heat nets fire the next energy revolution

15 April 2013 by Chelsea Wald Magazine issue 2912. Subscribe and save For similar stories, visit the Energy and Fuels Topic Guide

Waste heat costs us billions and messes with our climate now there's a grand plan to round it up and put it to work DEEP in the tunnels of the London Underground, as in many subway systems around the world, it's so hot it feels like hell. And yet in a basement only a few metres away, a boiler is firing to heat water for someone's shower. Rather than stewing in our excess heat, what if we could make it work for us? There is no shortage of waste heat, after all. Throughout City of heat (Image: Mathis Rekowski) our energy system from electricity 1 more image generation in a power plant to boiling a kettle, using boilers to warm houses to powering a car more than 50 per cent of the energy we use leaks into the surroundings as wasted heat. Recapturing it wouldn't just benefit our wallets. It would reverse some of the damaging effects that waste heat from our towns and cities is having on the climate. The good news is that several cities have found a way to hunt down their waste heat in some unexpected places. These cities are building systems that deliver heat in much the same way that networks handle electricity and water. Could they point the way to the next energy revolution? Waste heat is an enormous problem. A report in 2008 by the US Department of Energy found that the energy lost as heat each year by US industry is equal to the annual energy use of 5 million Americans. Power generation is a major culprit; the heat lost from that sector alone dwarfs the total energy use of Japan. The situation in other industrialised countries isn't much better. The report also estimated that given the right technologies, we could reclaim nearly half of that energy, but that's easier said than done. "We often talk about the quantity of waste heat," says David MacKay, chief scientific adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, "but not the quality." Most of what we think of as "waste heat" isn't actually all that hot; about 60 per cent is below 230 C While that may sound pretty hot, it is too cold to turn a turbine to generate electricity. The alternative is to just move the heat directly to where it is needed. That is what "cogeneration plants" do. These are power plants that capture some or all of their waste heat and send it as steam or hot water through a network of pipes to nearby cities. There, buildings tap into the network to warm their water supplies or air for central heating. Many countries are encouraging cogeneration. A US cogeneration initiative, for example, might save the country $10 billion a year. And cogeneration allows power plants to bump up their efficiencies from 30 per cent to almost 90 per cent. Yet waste heat from power plants is just a drop in the ocean compared with the heat lost from our

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homes, offices, road vehicles and trains. Waste heat from these myriad sources is much more difficult to harness than the waste heat from single, concentrated sources like power plants because it dribbles out. What's more, it is barely warm enough to earn its name. Reclaiming that is much trickier. As it happens, there is a technology that can siphon energy from tepid temperatures, and we have long had access to it. Ground source heat pumps have been helping homeowners save on heating bills since the 1940s, when US inventor Robert Webber realised he could invert the refrigeration process to extract heat from the ground. The system takes advantage of the fact that the ground is a terrible conductor of heat; in temperate regions regardless of surface temperature a few metres underground, the soil always remains around 10 C. Ground source heat pumps can tap into that stable temperature to heat a house in the winter.

Underground heat mine

The mechanism is simple. A network of pipes makes a circuit between the inside of the home and a coil buried underground. These pipes contain a mix of water and fluid refrigerant. As the fluid mixture travels through the pipes buried underground, it absorbs the heat from that 10 C soil. While this is not what you might consider hot, it nonetheless causes the refrigerant in the fluid to evaporate into a gas. When this gas circulates back into the house, it is fed through a compressor, which vastly intensifies the heat. That heat can then be used by a heat exchanger to warm up your hot water or air ducts (see "Waste not, want not"). This mechanism is powerful enough to efficiently provide heat even in places as cold as Norway and Alaska. It is also cheap. In the UK, the best systems lowered heating bills by 30 per cent because compressing a gas to heat your home requires far less energy than traditional gas or electric methods of heating. But that's not all they can do. Reverse the process on a ground source heat pump and it can cool your home in summer. If the ground is cold enough, the fluid in the pipes simply absorbs the heat from inside the building instead of from the ground. The only cost is circulating the liquid through the pipes. "You can use it as a free cooling source", says Stephen Hill, a London-based associate for global engineering firm Arup. The promise of ultra-efficient heating and cooling may explain why the popularity of heat pumps is now exploding, Hill says. In 2010, the UK heat pump market had grown to nearly 50 million, mostly installed in new houses and commercial buildings. The mechanism works even better when it's scaled up, Hill says. For example, Pacfico, a subway station in Madrid, Spain, uses a ground source heat pump to provide all its heating and cooling. But there's a catch. You can only scale these systems up so far before you hit a fundamental wall. It is simply not possible to put a ground source heat pump beneath every city building. For one thing, installation would require digging up the foundations beneath existing buildings. But even for new construction, it would be necessary as was the case in Madrid to drill a few hundred metres into the ground to install pipes long enough to allow heat exchange that would work for a whole building of offices or apartments. There is an alternative, though, and it's far better: use heat pumps to recapture urban waste heat. Just as ground source heat pumps pull the heat from the ground, urban waste heat pumps could mine the vast trove of accumulated waste heat beneath our cities from subway systems to sewers. They could then divert it to where it is needed, using a system of pipes and heat exchangers, creating an urban heat grid. As passengers often complain, exhaust heat accumulates in the train tunnels under many of our largest cities. Even on a cold day, temperatures on platforms in the London Underground can reach 20 C. To harvest that warmth, German companies Zblin and Rehau, together with Arup, have designed a liner for tunnel segments that functions like the buried coils in ground source heat pumps, using the heat generated by engines and braking along with that from the surrounding ground to warm the refrigerant, again by compression. As this transfers the excess energy from the tunnel to the refrigerant, the process also causes the tunnel to cool. The lining dubbed Energietbbing was placed into a 54-metre-long stretch of a new high-speed rail tunnel in Jenbach, Austria, to supply the municipal building above with enough heat to

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completely replace the existing boiler. It is still being optimised, but in its first successful winter it coped with outside temperatures as low as -15 C. London commuters could soon benefit as well. Crossrail, a railway being constructed under the city, is considering Energietbbing for several segments of the new tunnel, where it too would both cool the tunnel and provide the resulting heat to buildings above. Subway tunnels are far from the only source of urban waste heat. Consider the shower you took this morning, or the clothes you washed at the weekend. The heat that dribbled down US drains last year siphoned away 350 billion kilowatt-hours last year comparable to the total electricity produced by US hydropower. That energy dispersed into sewers which stew at a lukewarm 15 C. Projects all over the world are under way to use heat pumps to grab back some of that wastewater heat. One of the first cities to use their tepid sewage for large-scale heating was Oslo in Norway. There, much larger versions of the coils in a ground source heat pump are submerged in flowing raw sewage. From the sludge flowing through the sewer, the plant extracts 3 to 5 C, which it then concentrates by compression to a vastly hotter 90 C. And just like that, tepid sewage provides heat and hot water through a network of pipes for 13,000 apartments. Other countries have also recognised this potential gold mine. Vancouver taps heat from untreated sewage and funnels it back into a district that includes the Olympic Village built for the 2010 winter games, where it provides some 70 per cent of the needed heat and hot water. The city is planning to expand its heat networks, hooking them up to a variety of sources, including waste heat fed by local cogeneration plants. Indeed the larger the heat grid, the more sources it can draw from: cogeneration plants, subway tunnels, sewers and even data centres. "One of the key advantages of district heating is that it's adaptable to a wide variety of energy sources," says Chris Baber, part of the Vancouver project. One project in New Hampshire is even beginning to mine the decomposition heat from its landfill sites. Some cities are also starting to experiment with the cooling potential of heat pumps. The Finnish city of Helsinki uses waste heat to run absorption refrigerators. These devices can be thought of as more complex versions of heat pumps, but the basic idea is the same; when the fluid flows through hot areas, the refrigerant inside absorbs the heat. The upshot is that the mechanism can be used to cool entire districts, absorbing the heat from buildings and dumping it into purified wastewater. Denmark, Sweden and Finland lead the world in using heat pump technology to manipulate their cities' exhaust. Helsinki in particular has won awards for its large heating and cooling system, which features 1200 kilometres of underground heating pipes, connecting 93 per cent of the city's heated spaces. Whether this energy revolution will catch on elsewhere remains to be seen. Installing the necessary infrastructure will require steep investment and political will. A recent UK Department of Energy and Climate Change report complained that while up to half of the heat load in England is in areas where heat networks are economically viable, only 172,000 homes are currently hooked up. The cost of the heat pumps also means that in some countries the energy they produce is more expensive, even though they use less energy overall than boilers. "It's all about the cost of energy," says Jeff Snyder, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. Thanks to the shale gas boom in Canada, Vancouver's sewer heat is 10 per cent more expensive than heat from natural gas. That said, unlike fluctuating energy markets, the costs of ground source heat pumps will remain steady over time. "As the cost of energy increases, you'll see more of these things," Snyder says. However, there is a more important reason to take urban heat networks seriously: climate change. After all, waste heat doesn't just disappear if we don't recycle it. Concentrated into cities and radiated into the atmosphere in small dense pockets, it ends up shifting the jet stream, raising winter temperatures across a broad swathe of North America and northern Eurasia by as much as 1 C. This newly discovered consequence augments the already well-known greenhouse effect and the heat-island effect around cities. Heat generation accounts for a third of all carbon emissions in the UK, so reducing the overall amount of energy we need to use could even curtail greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, they might lead to a kind of virtuous circle. "Heat pumps keep getting more and more carbon efficient because they're using lower-carbon electricity to displace gas," says Hill. As we clean up our electricity, heat

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pumps will become carbon neutral. Using urban source heat pumps to recycle our waste heat in city-wide grids could help curb all three of these climate change culprits. That would be an energy revolution indeed. This article appeared in print under the headline "City of heat"

Reap the whirlwind

Waste heat is money, but we've long struggled to make use of it. Waste heat from power plants, for example, is too tepid to recycle for generating electricity (see main story). Instead, we simply get rid of it, using cooling towers to vent it into the atmosphere. What if those towers could be tweaked to generate electricity from the heat they send into the air? It could work, if the towers were tall enough. Then they could take advantage of convection: as waste heat rises up the chimney, the immense temperature difference between the cool air at the top and the warm air at the bottom creates an airflow powerful enough to turn a turbine back on the ground. Variations on this idea are already used elsewhere. China has constructed a massive chimney that harvests solar heat from Inner Mongolian deserts; Spain and Arizona have also built prototypes. There is just one problem. Extremely tall chimneys are impractical. When Eckhard Groll of Purdue University in Indiana, West Lafayette, reviewed several projects, he found that to generate even a fraction of the energy produced by a typical coal-fired power plant would require an 850-metre chimney, taller than the tallest building in the world. "The capital cost would be enormous," he says. Twelve years ago, Louis Michaud, an industrial engineer in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, had a better idea. If he could build a machine that creates a self-sustaining vortex a tornado it could funnel the waste heat all the way up to the troposphere and yet stay contained by its own centripetal forces. His idea raised many eyebrows but little interest. Recently, however, the idea has gained a big following. The Thiel Foundation offered Michaud $350,000 to build a prototype. From a much more practical 50-metre chimney, Michaud says, he'll create a 15-kilometre, 200-megawatt-generating tornado. "It's got the potential for producing all the electrical energy we need," he says.

Chelsea Wald is a writer based in Vienna, Austria

From issue 2912 of New Scientist magazine, page 30-33. As a subscriber, you have unlimited access to our online archive. Why not browse past issues of New Scientist magazine?

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