Kathy Hannun How to heat your home without hurting the planet TED Fellows
[SHAPE YOUR FUTURE]
One of the hallmarks of living
in a technologically advanced society
is even the little details of life
that seem mundane
end up being astonishing,
like the fact that it takes five gallons
of water to produce a walnut,
or that half the plastic
that’s ever been made
has been made in the past 15 years.
My favorite of these examples
is what it takes
to keep a room room temperature.
Allow me to explain.
Heating is generally done
by combusting a fossil fuel.
So first, we have to find the fuel.
Unfortunately, it tends to be buried
more than a kilometer
under the earth’s surface,
and all too often, in inconvenient places,
like the Arctic Circle,
nations in conflict
or under the bottom of the ocean.
Then there’s the fact that the substance
takes 60 to 600 million years
to form from dead plankton.
So there’s that issue.
We drill these incredibly
deep holes to get it.
Then we pipe it, truck it
and ship it in tankers
across the world to refineries,
which are these incredibly expensive
industrial facilities
that take in crude oil and gas,
which are just a bunch of different
hydrocarbon molecules,
in order to sort those molecules
into refined products.
Refined natural gas is then delivered
to homes and businesses
via an invisible interstate highway system
millions of miles long.
It’s invisible because it’s underground.
There’s so much pipeline in this system
that entire steel mills have been built
only to produce pipeline for this system.
And because there are
millions of miles of gas
getting pumped beneath us
at high pressure at all times,
engineers send these intelligent robots
called “smart pigs”
through the pipelines
to check for safety defects.
Doing this is called
“pigging the pipeline.”
(Pig snort sound)
Yeah, that’s a real thing.
But even with these precautions,
there are accidents.
In 2010, the San Bruno natural gas
pipeline exploded in California.
Eight people died.
Eyewitnesses reported the blast looked
like a wall of fire 1,000 feet tall.
More recently, in 2018, excess pressure
in natural gas pipelines in Massachusetts
resulted in explosions
that killed somebody
and forced 50,000 others from their homes.
But, you know, despite all of this,
we’re actually jealous of people who live
close enough to these insane pipelines
to get gas into their homes,
because everyone else is stuck
with even worse options,
like fuel oil and propane.
These fuels don’t have pipelines
in place for delivery,
so instead, tens of thousands of trucks
go from home to home
in neighborhoods throughout the country,
pumping these fuels into tanks
in homeowners' basements and yards.
And regardless of what heating fuel
you use – gas, propane or oil –
you better have a carbon
monoxide detector
so your heating system doesn’t
accidentally kill you in the night,
because hundreds of Americans die
in exactly that way each year.
So that’s the system we have today.
Safe to say, it has some downsides.
Don’t get me wrong –
it’s a marvel of human ingenuity,
but with some pretty serious drawbacks.
And the rigamarole of conventional heating
feels even more over the top
when you consider that every home
is already sitting right on top of
a vast reservoir of renewable energy:
geothermal energy.
Let’s talk about geothermal energy.
Starting a few feet under
the earth’s surface,
the ground is awash in thermal energy.
This is why caves and wine cellars,
they never get too hot or too cold.
They’re just bathed in
this low-grade heat.
Geothermal heating systems
draw on this heat,
using what are called “ground loops,”
which are just simple plastic pipes
buried under the yard.
These ground loops are then connected
to a heat pump that sits inside the home,
typically where a furnace once was.
More and more homeowners are choosing
geothermal over fuel-based options.
I see this shift up close every day,
because I cofounded a company
to create a new kind of ground-up utility
by making it as easy
and inexpensive as possible
to switch from conventional
heating to geothermal.
We’ve done this by creating a service
where homeowners can fill out
a form on our website,
we design a geothermal
heating system for them,
and then we install that system using
purpose-built tools and equipment.
Once the installation is done,
that home will have moved on
from fossil heating forever,
because those ground loops,
they’ll last as long as the home itself.
As each home switches over,
a new kind of utility is taking hold –
a distributed utility,
made up of homes exchanging
renewable energy with the ground.
This new infrastructure is simple,
local and inexpensive to operate,
and it represents a permanent
and wholesale shift
away from fossil fuels.
The groundwork is being laid, so to speak,
for the idea that maybe
we don’t need to destroy the world
in order to keep our rooms
at a comfortable temperature.
Let’s leave the Arctic Circle
and the seafloor alone,
bypass the refineries and the pipelines
and stop worrying that our families will
accidentally be poisoned in the night.
Instead, let’s use the massive
amounts of energy
that are already right there
for the taking,
right beneath every building on earth.
Thank you.