Is the solution to climate change right beneath our feet?
is a final year Mechanical Engineering student at the University of Huddersfield. He is investigating eco-friendly heating solutions for his dissertation and has the support of Holmfirth-based Earthtestenergy, one of the leading suppliers of geothermal systems
THERE’S no denying there’s a problem. Climate change is quite possibly the most pressing matter our generation will encounter. The faceless doom that’s engulfing our planet and smothering it with an everincreasing amount of greenhouse gasses, carbon emissions, forest fires, melting Ice caps, the list goes on.
The problem isn’t going away. In the UK, and many other areas of the world, we are currently living in a state of emergency, both socially and economically, with people struggling to afford to heat their homes and worrying how it will hurt our planet.
Currently the most common method of heating homes in the UK are gas boiler central heating systems, with around 83% of dwellings utilising them.
Naturally the burning of this
gas has a huge impact on climate change, accounting for more than a third of our current emissions and 14% of UK greenhouse gasses annually.
From a social and economic standpoint there is the everincreasing price of gas, which sadly is forcing more and more of the UK population to choose between eating and heating.
Sadly, an inability to heat our homes can sometimes be tragic with research, by the National Energy Action and climatechange charity E3G, finding that around 3,000 people needlessly die in their homes each year, as they cannot afford to properly heat them properly.
These two key points highlight the need for affordable, sustainable and reliable ecofriendly heating solutions to be implemented both quickly and effectively.
So how can we fight the faceless enemy? We’ve all seen
them. Fields of wind farms, roofs covered in solar panels, but are these really the solution to our ever-growing problem?
Whilst admirable and certainly helping reduce our usage of fossil fuels, the most popular methods of wind and solar energy are not solely the way.
In the West Yorkshire we all know and love we’re not exactly famous for our long sunny days, with strong beams of sunlight we can rely on to consistently provide us with energy, and you can forget about getting power from solar panels at night!
While we certainly do have strong winds, this can sometimes be a problem, as turbines are usually shut off when wind speeds exceed 55mph to reduce the risk of them being damaged, rendering them sometimes useless.
If we solely relied on wind the recent Storm Ciara’s recorded speeds of 97mph would have left us powerless.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a source of energy we could harness to heat our homes that was constantly available, environmentally clean and didn’t create a (debatable) eye-sore?
Well ... there is!