ENERGY EFFICIENCY
Heating More with Less

A Heat Pump developed at ORNL.

The earth stores almost half the energy it receives from the sunat least 500 times more energy than humankind needs each year. By exploiting this impressive energy storage capability, geothermal heat pumps (GHPs) warm and cool buildings and provide hot water. Using a system of underground pipes containing an environmentally friendly heat-exchange fluid, a GHP transfers heat from the warmer earth to a building in the winter and moves heat from a building in the summer for discharge into the cooler ground.

An Environmental Protection Agency study recently showed that the GHP is the most energy efficient, environmentally benign, and cost-effective space-conditioning system available. Despite their potential, GHPs were still regarded as "new" in 1990, and their delivery infrastructure was still in its infancy. Careful research and technical assistance provided by ORNL's Buildings Technology Center cleared the way for widespread acceptance and implementation of GHPs in federal facilities and helped usher GHPs into the mainstream of the U.S. heating and cooling industry.

Since the late 1970s, ORNL's Patrick Hughes has researched, field-tested, and improved the engineering of GHP systems. During the mid-1980s, Van Baxter, Vince Mei, and others at ORNL helped upgrade component technologies for GHP systems. Hughes and John Shonder documented the energy- and cost-saving benefits of GHPs in an evaluation of a 4000-home GHP retrofit at the U.S. Army's Fort Polk Joint Readiness Training Center near Leesville, Louisiana. The study found that electricity use was reduced by 33% in the retrofitted homes, and summer peak electricity demand was cut by 43%.

In 1998 the Federal Energy Management Program launched a program, supported by Hughes and Shonder's team, to make GHPs available to federal agencies. Since then, the annual federal investment in GHPs continues to grow, reaching $76 million in 2001.

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