Geothermal energy seeks to bring anonymity and luxury to all homes
What do they have in common? Sant Pau hospital in Barcelonahe Oceanografic from Valencia or the Canalejas shopping center from Madrid? The answer is that your systems heating and air conditioning They are powered by the same energy source, with the heat emanating from undergroundthrough geothermal, a renewable and inexhaustible source of energy traditionally associated with large wells and prospecting many meters underground, but which also has a more superficial version, which for decades has been providing heating, air conditioning and domestic hot water to homes in northern Europe . Also in Spain, where at the moment it is a little known technologysomewhat disorganized and converted rather into a luxury itema concept from which companies in the sector want to remove it to “democratize” it.
“We want to put geothermal energy on the agenda. Open many heads”he states, bluntly, Margaret of Gregory, general director of Geoenergya business association that has just been born to give “visibility” to an energy source that flows from hundreds of meters underground but also from levels closer to the surface and thatand can reach homes as they do today gas pipes or heat pumps that run on electricity from other renewable sources.
As we dig underground, The earth’s temperature increases 25 degrees for every kilometer of depth and this heat, passed through the water from natural or artificial aquifers, becomes water vapor capable of moving the turbines of a power plant to produce electricity on a large scale, when it involves very high temperatures, up to 150 degrees, which, in a way exceptionally, they can be found two, three or five kilometers deep. Next to this deep geothermal There is another one called “medium”, at a lower but also high temperature, of between 80 and 100 degrees, which allows feeding spas, spas or fish farms. Along with these two, the “shallow geothermal” can carry heating or air conditioning to homes taking advantage of an underground temperature of about 19 or 20 degrees which, in the case of Spain, is throughout its territory.
This is where the work that Geoenergía has set comes in to promote and “put at the forefront” this energy and promote a regulatory framework that favors shallow geothermal energy, capable of providing heat from the earth simply from five meters below the surface, where around 20 degrees of temperature can already be reached. Through drilling up to that level, A closed circuit is created to which geothermal pumps are connected, “the size of a refrigerator” and much more efficient than the heat pumps that are now installed by “thousands”. In some cases, they will convert the heat of the earth into heating and hot water in exchange for transferring the cold to the depths of the earth, from where it will be recovered in warmer periods to power cooling systems to keep houses cool in summer.
“It doesn’t matter if Filomena comes or a heat wave, the soil is always at the same temperature, it is the cellar effect and it is highly efficient because there will never be peaks in demand,” says the person in charge of Geoenergy, who insists that geothermal energy is “constant”, does not require maintenance and that, depending on what it replaces, it allows a savings of up to 30 or 35% of the electricity bill.
“When we have had to drill to extract oil, gas or coal and all the streets of Spain to put gas into the kitchen, there has been no no problem and now we have to drill to get a renewable and highly efficient resourcethey are all the problems of the world,” laments De Gregorio, who since the beginning of May has been at the head of an association that arises from another, Geoplat, dedicated to geothermal energy since 2009 and largely financed by the Ministry of Science. His The objective is to bring together companies that are dedicated both to seeking the earth’s heat at great depths and to making installations in houses and public buildings to achieve the penetration in Spain that it already has in other European countries. For now, the association. It sets the framework for the industry to gather around it, both large companies that come from hydrocarbon drilling experience and other more specialized ones. The Spanish sector even has something “very rare”, such as a. geothermal pump manufacturer, EcoForest, which provides devices more adapted to the Mediterranean climate than those that come from northern Europe. For now, companies such as Repsol or Telur have approached the association which, in the words of De Gregorio, seeks to “stop being so niche.”
221 homes in Chamartín
Maybe he largest housing project with this technology is in the Madrid center. In 2012, a group of school parents, including architects and engineers knowledgeable in this sector, decided to form a cooperative to, in the middle of the financial crisis and with bank credit almost closed, to build in the neighborhood of Chamartin a building of 220 homes, of between 60 and 300 square meters, which would obtain the necessary energy from the heat of the earth to have heating and air conditioning and preheat domestic hot water with the help of a gas installation.
14 meters from the third basement of the building and below where today there is an immense swimming pool and neighborhood gardens, they were made 70 drillings of 125 meters to supply heat and cold to the pump that provides heating in winter and natural air conditioning in summer and preheats domestic hot water, with the help of gas boilers, in a system that runs along 87,500 linear meters of pipes to carry out the heat exchange using pumps locked under seven keys in the community’s technical room. Cold and heat circulate through the floors through radiating floor which also avoids having radiators on the floors or unsightly outdoor installations such as air conditioning.
In total, the geothermal exchange system, which was built at the same time as the houses were built, represented a additional cost of 0.8% to the total projectexplain two of their neighbors and the first cooperative members, Joaquin Garciawho was also the architect, and Marcel Hendriks, who then worked in a geothermal consulting firm and is from the Netherlands, a country that at that time had a notable advantage over Spain in this technology. They also had the help that, at least at that time, in the Ministry of Industry of the Madrid’s community to which they had to notify their plans was known and supported geothermal energy, something they recognize that It doesn’t happen in other communities, with disparate criteria and, directly, little desire to encourage an alternative to gas boilers.
Many developers they turned to for construction rejected it because they did not understand why they had to pass on part of the cost to installing geothermal energy. “They did not see it as a commercial claim“recalls García. The first neighbors, although they were not experts, did trust in geothermal energy, which was inseparable from the cooperative in which they were going to enter. The cost was amortized in about nine years and today a 135 meter house squares in this building in Chamartín has a heating bill of 90 euros per month, almost half of the 200 euros that a 70-meter home can pay with diesel. In a free-standing home of 400 square meters, geothermal means a monthly bill of 100 euros, they say of another known case.
Geothermal district networks
This building, due to the number of homes, could be the little brother ofThe “district networks” model What Geoenergy dreams of, which contravenes the idea established in recent decades that individual systems are better than collective ones. “They have sold us that having your little pot [de gas] at home is the most efficient. No, the most efficient is where we came from, from a installation that serves several buildings”, something that De Gregorio assures is “something that can be done with geothermal energy.”
At the moment, in Spain there are five district networks but in the center of Paris it has been operating since the last century. Geothermal energy is normalized in the countries of the north Europe or has even left the German city “without drillers” Munich, which is digging to obtain medium geothermal energy and meet its goal of being a neutral emissions city by 2035. The situation in Spain is different and, above all, unequal. “In Catalonia there is a lot, also in the Basque Country or in Zaragoza”, De Gregorio lists communities where it is more on the agenda, especially in Public Buildings. However, the concept “a lot” is relative because the use of the earth’s heat to provide heating and air conditioning is still very minority, unknown in general terms and about which there is not even official data. “It’s not on the public agenda,” De Gregorio laments.
Without data but oriented towards luxury
Little is known with certainty about how many buildings there are in Spain with geothermal energy. Official data says that the eequivalent to a power of 200 megawatts -the installed power of wind energy exceeds 30,000, for example-, although Geoenergía suspects that this figure could bend Taking into account that, due to how easy it is to make an installation that requires little more than a drilling to introduce a pipe that connects to the coil of a geothermal pump, there are many houses that do not register them. Precisely, one of the tasks of the association is collect reliable figures and also overcome one of the great barriers of this sector, as of many others: that citizens Know that there is help for this.
Residential buildings are the least, although more and more “premium” promotions In places like La Finca or La Moraleja they offer geothermal energy as a luxury item. It is also a medium-high profile that Geoenergía observes in another area with known cases, around Las Rozas, in the northern area of Madrid, in chalets that already border the Natura Network and that, apart from complications due to the conditions that a protected space entails, is an “especially favorable” area for geothermal energy because the gas does not reach it but also because The profile of the owner there is usually of a medium-high socioeconomic level and with the ability to understand this technology. Despite this, Geoenergía seeks to take geothermal energy out of the luxury level and bring it to all homes. “We what “we want to democratize.”
