It's a common household issue,fuel prices.Wether you use diesel,gas,kerosene or even electricity,the costs of heating up a house in winter is remarkably high,and forms a substantial part of the running cost of any house.Everyone is looking into newer ways of fighting the cold months of winter,and nothing is really making that much of a difference!Even fireplaces,I have checked with some people who are using them and they say 7a6ab(wood logs )is not that cheap either.Electricity is not feasible either since the pricing is exponential,the cost per watt increases as your consumption increases.The other day I met with a swiss engineer who was participating in a confernce in Jordan about energy issues and he explained to me a method of creating energy from the earth that has left me speechless.I could not find anything about his specific company over the net but I found a lot of useful information on the use of earth energy and geothermal energy,that has made me hope that one day ,we will reach that stage that some houses in switzerland and scandanvia have reached of consuming zero energy apart from that taken from earth ,they neither pay for electricity or anything to heat and light up the house nor run any electrical appliances .The whole system ,as I understood at least,revolves around the basic knowledge that the earth is cold in its uper layers and hot in the lower layes,so the deeper you dig the hotter it gets.And what they do is that they insert pipes quite deep in the earth and the water inside these pipes heats up enough to transfer the heat upwards and create energy that is used for all of the above mentioned purposes.This can be done in seperate plants each dedicated to a certain building or centrally where you have one huge plant that distributes the energy to a housing or commercial compound .And this of course is renewable and clean environment friendly energy.
The cost to create such a plant in his estimate is no moe than 30% more than regular heating methods.Personally I doubt this figure is true,especially in the beginning when the system is new and untried in areas like Jordan and the middle east.Now I don't know old old these methods are,this might be more common than I think,and maybe more people and countries are using it efficiently now,but I have to say that I was really impressed with this system and I really hope someone would take the initiative and try to apply it here in Jordan .It would be such a relief from all that energy costs that we spend monthly.And maybe one day we will not be worried wether the diesel will be enough to last us through the cold night or wether mr. seekawi the diesel guy will agree to come and fill up our tanks late at night when we've just discovered that we ran out of solar(diesel)!
click here to read more about earth energy systems:
Saturday, January 21, 2006
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On January, 21, 2006 6:35 PM , salam
said:
sounds like an interesting course ,I didn't take such a course but I do like the concept.
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One of my favorite classes I took in the University was passive heating and cooling. I am most fascinated by the temperature comfort levels that can be achieved simply by designing the orientation of the building, windows and shading devices to capture sun in the winter and block it in the summer.
Unfortunately, many of these passive heating and cooling technologies have a large start-up cost. One of my greatest frustrations is seeing clients over and over again sacrifice the long term savings so they can save a few dollars today.
I'm glad to see the government here offering incentives (usually tax breaks) to encourage people to use these strategies. Ultimately, the government benifits greatly when the energy consumption goes down.