In Paris, France the French are beginning to pipe the warm air in a subway station, created by the running trains and the collective body heat, to an apartment just above the station. This idea is useful, saving the apartment building money on energy costs and cutting its carbon emissions by a third.
This idea is not new however, as it has already been implemented in the Mall of America in Minneapolis, MN and in Sweden. In Stockholm, where there are roughly 250,000 people traveling through the city's main train station a day, engineers have used the ventilation system to bring the warm air to a system that heats water. The engineers do not only use it to heat the building where it comes from however, like in the Mall of America, they pipe some of the heated water to a nearby office building, cutting the heating costs of the building by up to 20%.
Also we have obviously used our own body heat for a long time in "huddling for warmth" and with the idea of blankets, or layers of clothing to trap our heat, rather than let it escape. It is extremely interesting to me that, while schools and other buildings account for body heat when doing their heating calculations, we have not looked more into the idea of simply conserving the heat that our bodies release as a means of cutting our energy bills and carbon emissions. There has been some focus on energy-efficient windows and building materials, but it all seems on a small-scale.
Capturing human body heat to transfer into electricity to heat buildings seems very interesting. Since our global population keeps exponentially expanding, this could be another way to harness wasted heat energy and turn it into something productive. However, the technology and research of this project doesn't seem up to par with the new conventional sources of energy being developed for our future energy outlook.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the skepticism, Blair, but the figure of cutting electricity costs by 20% is quite a significant change - where can we look for more info, Brian?
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