Archive for the 'Renewable energy resource: geothermal' Category

Stanford’s Green Dorm

July 26th, 2007 in Home, Making more efficient use of energy, Controlling carbon emissions, Energy technology: fuel cells, What's going on in California?, What should we do?, Renewable energy resource: geothermal and Renewable Energy Resource: solar. 1 Comment

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A few facts: in the U.S., residential and commercial space accounts for 40 percent of our primary energy consumption and 38 percent of CO2 emissions are from operating buildings. Why, then, is so little attention paid to building energy efficient offices and residences? Prof. Gil Masters from Stanford University wants to change that. His dream to build a student dorm that is green and clean is being realized: the Green Dorm project at Stanford is under way.

My students talked to him about this project, which includes the use of geothermal heat pumps, solar heating and fuel cells. Now, if Gil got his way, the dorm would have one or more pluggable hybrids also…

More on geothermal energy: The little known energy resource

June 27th, 2007 in Home and Renewable energy resource: geothermal. 0 Comments

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Following up on his lecture on geothermal energy, Professor Roland Horne met with some of my students. Horne is an expert in extracting heat from the earth. Hear more about the engineering and science behind traditional geothermal energy, and the promising “hot dry rock” process.

Geothermal energy: The little known resource

April 6th, 2007 in Home, The world's energy systems, What should we do? and Renewable energy resource: geothermal. 0 Comments

In Iceland and a few other countries, geothermal energy delivers a large part of the energy used for heating or cooling, through geothermal heat pumps. You may be surprised to hear that there are hundreds of thousands of buildings in the U.S. that are also hooked up to such systems. Geothermal energy is also applied at larger scales for electricity generation in various countries. Roland Horne, who leads the geothermal institute at Stanford University, gives an overview of existing and future geothermal energy systems. In future podcasts, we’ll take a closer look at the interesting Enhanced Geothermal Systems, aka Hot Dry Rock, which Roland discusses as a potentially important future energy source.