Glasgow's SWG3 will now be powered by dancer's body heat:
This renewable energy system runs via heat flowing through pipes that are charged as a thermal battery before being emitted back into the venue.
[...] It's claimed by SWG3 owners that the venue can completely disconnect from gas boilers, reducing its carbon emissions by about 70 tonnes of CO2 a year.
The BODYHEAT system, produced by renewable energy company TownRock Energy, was first introduced to the venue as a trial during the COP26 summit in Glasgow last year at an estimated cost of £600,000.
"To put in perspective, if we were to go down a more conventional route with typical air conditioning, then your costs would probably be about 10% of that - so £60,000," Managing Director Andrew Fleming-Brown told the BBC.
Fleming-Brown also has said: "As well as being a huge step towards our goal of becoming net zero and will hopefully influence others from our industry and beyond to follow suit, working together to tackle climate change."
[...] "You know they don't want to be kind of beaten at cool clubbing technology." He adds: "They've seen what we've done in Glasgow and really want it in Berlin."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by istartedi on Thursday October 27 2022, @05:08AM (6 children)
TFA is short on details, but the company that installed the system is a geothermal energy company. Geothermal is a real thing. I suspect this is just the usual deal where journalists take some minor, legitimate aspect of the system and spin it way out of proportion. It's certainly true that a geothermal system wouldn't need to pull as much heat in when the house is rockin', but by no means are the dancers entirely responsible for heating or cooling the building. A smart geothermal system will automatically compensate for sources of heat being emitted within the space it's controlling, and will certainly get some assistance from occupants when it makes sense. I suspect that's all this is.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday October 27 2022, @06:13AM (3 children)
Very short on details indeed. My best guess tho would be that they built some kind of "passive house", lots of insulation to trap body heat and the heat from lamps and equipment inside. Certainly lamps should produce a lot of heat in a night club. Geothermal heating could be a part of it. But that by itself doesn't make sense as it would have nothing to do with body heat. Then they should have just said we are heating the building with geothermal, could be a journalistic interpretation error. But then nothing much would be very exciting about that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday October 27 2022, @09:19AM
> insulation to trap body heat
Most nightclubs are actively cooled to remove excessive heat (air conditioned). So there must be more to it than that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Michael on Thursday October 27 2022, @11:27AM
They're heating the building with geothermal when the building is cold, but they're also heating the geothermal with the building when the building is too hot.
It's a thermal battery with sufficient capacity to absorb the excess heat in summer and keep it for several months until it's needed in winter.
Usually this is called a seasonal thermal energy storage system. A passive (not actively pumped) version of this also operates in earth-sheltered buildings such as the earth-sheltered umbrella house design.
Or, if you use a covered pond of water or brine, you can charge the thermal mass with evacuated tube solar-thermal collectors, and then the thermal battery gets hot enough to heat water up (most of the way) for your hot water taps too.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 27 2022, @05:50PM
I'm thinking it's probably a heat-pump system which puts excess heat during crowded times into a geothermal sink for later extraction...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Informative) by Michael on Thursday October 27 2022, @11:11AM
The difference between this and a normal geothermal setup is that when there's excess heat in the building it's put back into the ground to be withdrawn later.
https://townrockenergy.com/portfolio/swg3-bodyheat/ [townrockenergy.com]
Similar systems are seen in agricultural greenhouses and district heating systems in northern europe. Often they're called "seasonal thermal energy storage" (STES) systems. When it's too hot on the surface you use the thermal mass of a volume of ground or a big tank of water to remove heat from a coolant loop. If the size of the thermal battery is carefully chosen, cooling the building in summer raises the temperature of the thermal battery to the point where it's warmed up enough by winter to use the cooling loop as a heating loop.
(Score: 4, Informative) by UncleBen on Thursday October 27 2022, @01:45PM
Is it a geothermal STORAGE system? They use a heat-pump, run it in "cooling" during the dancers' heat-generating, storing the heat in a thermal mass. Then when the place is quiet, they run it in "heating" and pull that stored heat from the thermal mass. You can use dirt or water as the thermal mass.
Dirt: bury miles (literally) of looped tubing under an excavated area. Under a new construction parking lot, driveway, slab, or basement is ideal. Only deep enough to avoid seasonal temp-swings. Pump coolant through the pipes to heat or cool the mass of surrounding dirt. How big the area dug depends on how much heat you'll want to pul. This is determined by how long. The dance hall probably uses a diurnal system, hoping only to store 1 day's worth of heat. Seasonal (annual) storage systems can get really large. Challenges: needs a large number of square-feet excavated (temporarily) for install OR repair. Leaks can contaminate a lot of soil if something other than pure water is pumped through the loops.
Water: Contained
There's another way, burying a barrel of water/coolant. Same as above, just bury a quantity of water that holds enough heat to get you through the period of time you need. This requires a smaller square-footage hole to install. It may even be theoretically possible to construct as a mining operation. Dig out a cave under the basement, build-coat a containment, seal the hole behind you, fill with water, presto: thermal mass. Risks are leaks, but we have pretty good experience with this. Also, if you choose to use pure water, the leak won't contaminate the soil. It may erode and cause collapse, but again, leak detection and mitigation experience from underground fuel storage systems.
Water: Water table
There's a third method: drill 2 wells into the water table, heat the water, pump it down, etc. Same as above. This has the least square footage involved/exposed. Drill truck comes in, leaves two little stubby pipes. This is being tried in my area, but it has a lot of risks. If the heat exchanger leaks coolant into the water, you're contaminating the drinking water for a lot of people for a very long time. The effects of the normal operating of these systems is not well understood. There's a bacterial concern on top of leak-risk, as well as simply depositing metals from the erosion of the plumbing.
Most of us, most of the time, think "geothermal energy" is tapping a heat source. Using it as a battery is a pretty cool trick, tanks, tubes, or wells.
(Score: 1) by BigJ on Thursday October 27 2022, @07:11AM (3 children)
162 barrels * $100/barrel = $16200 / year = £13957 / year
£600000-£60000=£540000 excess investment in recovery system vs air conditioner (from article)
£540000 / £13957 = 38.7 years breakeven
Cost increases of oil would need to exceed inflation rate to bring the breakeven down.
13957 / 540000 = 2.6% about the interest rate for a savings account at an online bank
The venue could have invested the excess cost in a low risk investment and used the proceeds to pay for the amount of energy that the recovery system saves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2022, @07:54AM
Of course, everyone buys their oil from ebay/amazon, at the market price, with free delivery, then burns it as it is, no refinement required. Same goes with the natural gas, especially the Russian one.
Now, if the reality is not like this, go blame Joe Biden.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 27 2022, @05:48PM (1 child)
>could have invested the excess cost in a low risk investment and used the proceeds to pay for the amount of energy that the recovery system saves
Yes, but this would have the opposite effect of promotions based on "powered by your body heat!" which, on balance, could be the difference between success and failure of the venture.
Never underestimate the power of popular buzz...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2022, @09:35PM
FTFY
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Thursday October 27 2022, @07:38AM
Instead of dupes, they're now probably called coppertops.
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Thursday October 27 2022, @09:12PM
Fresh air circulation may be reduced.
And that plays poorly with infections like COVID.
This is a nightclub.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday October 28 2022, @10:11AM
They must have found a way to fix that pesky Third Law of Thermodynamics.