3 ms·
The advantage over heat pumps is simplicity lower total investment. If you need 1/10th as many PV panels that’s not just less cost but less land use and less p
by Retric 3y ago
The advantage over heat pumps is simplicity lower total investment. If you need 1/10th as many PV panels that’s not just less cost but less land use and less pollution from mining the materials etc.
In terms of impact, lakes are heat sinks that average out energy gain and loss over a year, but the numbers get huge.
For scale a single hour being cloudy or sunny could be an ~10 terawatt-hours worth of energy being dumped into the lake or not and that doesn’t have a significant impact. Meanwhile Canada total electricity demand at 577 terawatt-hours in 2022. Even cooling every house in the country across a full summer just isn’t going to move the needle here.
- timr 3y ago> For scale a single hour being cloudy or sunny could be an ~10 terawatt-hours worth of energy being dumped into the lake or not and that doesn’t have a significant impact. Meanwhile Canada total electricity demand at 577 terawatt-hours in 2022. Even cooling every house in the country across a full summer just isn’t going to move the needle here. I'm not worried about it, but I don't think you can just assume that energy input from sunlight at the surface of the lake is going to be equivalent to slurping up cold water from the deep, heating it, and re-injecting it. Sunlight doesn't make it more than about 200m underwater, and deep bodies of water have distinct layers of temperature and density, largely because the water doesn't circulate freely through those layers. At the very least, you're creating a current where none existed before.
- actionfromafar 3y agoThe return pipe was apparently not in deep waters?
- Reason077 3y agoHeated water is not returned directly to the lake in the Enwave system. It forms part of the city's normal municipal drinking water supply: treated and sent to a pumping station for distribution.