Boston skyline from Spectacle Island.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Of course, Putin’s attack on Ukraine and the resulting European energy crisis have accelerated efforts to create economies not based on gas, oil and coal from petrostate dictatorships such as Russia. It reminds me of the stuff that came out of the pressure of World War II – mass use of antibiotics and radar, jet engines, new building materials and, yes, the atomic bomb, which was used to end the war in Asia and the Pacific started by the brutal Japanese Empire – adding a new kind of existential fear.
One of the most interesting examples of this recent reactive innovation is in Helsinki, Finland.
There, a new, carbon-neutral heating system is planned in which a tunnel will be used to pull water from the seabed, where water temperature stays constant. The water would then be processed through heat pumps.
Bloomberg City Lab reports that “{H}eat exchangers will remove about 2.7 degrees (Fahrenheit) of heat from the seawater, which will later be returned to the sea via another nine-kilometer tunnel. The energy collected will then be refined via the heat pump process to reach temperatures of up to 203 degrees.’’
Bloomberg reports that “by processing the water through underground heat pumps, the system could generate enough heat to serve as much as 40 percent of the Finnish capital.’’
This is something that should be looked into by some New England coastal communities, especially the biggest ones — Boston, Providence, New Haven, Portland, New London, etc. Meanwhile, if you can scrounge the several thousand dollars to buy and install a heat pump for your home, you can save a lot of money over the long run.
