McMaster University
Summary
As we move toward a cleaner energy future, there is a growing push to electrify everything, from cars to home heating. While that sounds ideal, it is also much more than a matter of simply plugging in.
If we were all relying on electrical forms of heating, electricity demand would be substantially higher on the coldest days of the year and overwhelm the grid. The solution to this problem, however, lies not in the heat we generate but the heat we reuse. We need to start seeing the heat we make as a readily recoverable, carbon-free resource and do much more to harness it. There is already technology that can harvest and store such heat for months in underground thermal batteries until it is needed.
We can recover the heat by piping water through hot underground batteries and running those pipes into nearby buildings, like a big boiler-and-radiator system, except the boiler is actually an underground battery charged not with electricity, but with heat.
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