CSPAN and Geothermal Energy

I'm thrilled to say my appearance on C-SPAN BookTV last weekend went well, and you can watch the presentation here. Thanks, C-SPAN: that's provided by the cable companies, so it's kind of a gift from the infrastructure.

In other infrastructure news, this story in Sunday's News & Observer talked about how Elon College in Elon, NC, is going to be heating and cooling new dorms by using geothermal energy. Pretty simple: It's like a heat pump. Surface temperature water goes hundreds of feet down into the earth and returns, in closed loops. In the summer that cools it off, radiating heat into the earth, so you use it for cooling; in the winter, the natural underground temperature is warmer than the air, so it's used to warm things up. Then you're paying to operate the pumps and the heat exchanger, but otherwise you're saving a lot of money -- and instead of generating energy, you're using energy free from the planet. I'm for that.

Posted by Scott Huler
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