Geothermal power
would be a great solution, were we able to tap into it. We're sitting on a huge fission reactor under the earth's crust, which has kept it warm for billions of years, However, save for places like Iceland where the magma reaches the surface, it's beyond our current technology to drill deep enough to access this heat source. And these locations are also inherently geologically unstable.

There is another so-called geothermal technology, which isn't really geothermal at all. It uses a heat pump (essentially a refrigerator) to transfer heat from pipes buried in your garden to radiators in your house. The amount of usable heat produced by this method is typically 2 or 3 times greater than the energy required to drive the system, as most of the energy comes from the heat in the ground. But close to the surface, this is actually derived from solar heating, rather than true geothermal energy from below.

It's still a very efficient way to heat your house though. If you had a biggish stream running through your property, you could dam it and use the stored energy to turn a turbine, which in turn would drive the heat pump.

I would love to do this one day!
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 13:41, Reply)