Solar Thermal Housing Development: Drake Landing
On Monday Clean Technica featured an introduction to solar thermal energy. So it was good to see that an entire housing subdivision has been built in Calgary, Canada, using solar thermal energy for 90% of its space heating needs. Drake Landing Solar Community starts with structures that are 30% more efficient than standard, so the baseline energy needs are already lower. The community uses a borehole thermal energy storage (BTES) system which stores large quantities of solar heat in summer for use in Calgary’s cold winter. The BTES is actually a large underground heat exchanger. Each home is also equipped with its own solar thermal water heater.
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I am still waiting for new data from this interesting project.
they store summer heat in some 50 deep boreholes to heat thousands of cubic metres of soil deep down.
They figure ir will take years to accumulate enough heat to serve the whole development all winter.
Excellent idea, depends a lot on the geology, wqatertable and such, have been following this and visited there, but recent data are hard to come by…
i have a few illustrations from thw drake landing website showing the borehole configuration, here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/vizpix/EcodesignAndCommentary/photo#5092337161056956562“><img src=”http://lh4.ggpht.com/vizpix/RqudqulSMJI/AAAAAAAAF-0/jHbyQTeftMY/s144/okotoks%20boreholes.jpg
Thanks for the photos. This will be an important proving ground for large-scale solar thermal.
[...] a house is to install a solar thermal collector. It collects solar energy to provide warm water or warm air for your house, even in the far north. On a larger scale, mirrors can be used to focus heat from the sun to boil [...]
In Sweden there is a residental area (anneberg outside Stockholm) with size and technology very similar to the Drakes Landing project, but some years older. We now have accumulated some experience and a savibg of heating and tap warmwater of some 60% is obtained. Actually some 5 years ago we had a visit of a Canadian studygroup.