[SHAPE YOUR FUTURE]
One of the hallmarks of living in a technologically advanced society is even the little details of life that seem mundane end up being astonishing, like the fact that it takes five gallons of water to produce a walnut, or that half the plastic that's ever been made has been made in the past 15 years. My favorite of these examples is what it takes to keep a room room temperature.
Allow me to explain. Heating is generally done by combusting a fossil fuel. So first, we have to find the fuel. Unfortunately, it tends to be buried more than a kilometer under the earth's surface, and all too often, in inconvenient places, like the Arctic Circle, nations in conflict or under the bottom of the ocean. Then there's the fact that the substance takes 60 to 600 million years to form from dead plankton. So there's that issue.
We drill these incredibly deep holes to get it. Then we pipe it, truck it and ship it in tankers across the world to refineries, which are these incredibly expensive industrial facilities that take in crude oil and gas, which are just a bunch of different hydrocarbon molecules, in order to sort those molecules into refined products.
Refined natural gas is then delivered to homes and businesses via an invisible interstate highway system millions of miles long. It's invisible because it's underground. There's so much pipeline in this system that entire steel mills have been built only to produce pipeline for this system. And because there are millions of miles of gas getting pumped beneath us at high pressure at all times, engineers send these intelligent robots called "smart pigs" through the pipelines to check for safety defects. Doing this is called "pigging the pipeline."
(Pig snort sound)
Yeah, that's a real thing. But even with these precautions, there are accidents. In 2010, the San Bruno natural gas pipeline exploded in California. Eight people died. Eyewitnesses reported the blast looked like a wall of fire 1,000 feet tall. More recently, in 2018, excess pressure in natural gas pipelines in Massachusetts resulted in explosions that killed somebody and forced 50,000 others from their homes.
But, you know, despite all of this, we're actually jealous of people who live close enough to these insane pipelines to get gas into their homes, because everyone else is stuck with even worse options, like fuel oil and propane. These fuels don't have pipelines in place for delivery, so instead, tens of thousands of trucks go from home to home in neighborhoods throughout the country, pumping these fuels into tanks in homeowners' basements and yards. And regardless of what heating fuel you use -- gas, propane or oil -- you better have a carbon monoxide detector so your heating system doesn't accidentally kill you in the night, because hundreds of Americans die in exactly that way each year.
So that's the system we have today. Safe to say, it has some downsides. Don't get me wrong -- it's a marvel of human ingenuity, but with some pretty serious drawbacks. And the rigamarole of conventional heating feels even more over the top when you consider that every home is already sitting right on top of a vast reservoir of renewable energy: geothermal energy.
Let's talk about geothermal energy. Starting a few feet under the earth's surface, the ground is awash in thermal energy. This is why caves and wine cellars, they never get too hot or too cold. They're just bathed in this low-grade heat. Geothermal heating systems draw on this heat, using what are called "ground loops," which are just simple plastic pipes buried under the yard. These ground loops are then connected to a heat pump that sits inside the home, typically where a furnace once was.
More and more homeowners are choosing geothermal over fuel-based options. I see this shift up close every day, because I cofounded a company to create a new kind of ground-up utility by making it as easy and inexpensive as possible to switch from conventional heating to geothermal. We've done this by creating a service where homeowners can fill out a form on our website, we design a geothermal heating system for them, and then we install that system using purpose-built tools and equipment. Once the installation is done, that home will have moved on from fossil heating forever, because those ground loops, they'll last as long as the home itself.
As each home switches over, a new kind of utility is taking hold -- a distributed utility, made up of homes exchanging renewable energy with the ground. This new infrastructure is simple, local and inexpensive to operate, and it represents a permanent and wholesale shift away from fossil fuels.
The groundwork is being laid, so to speak, for the idea that maybe we don't need to destroy the world in order to keep our rooms at a comfortable temperature. Let's leave the Arctic Circle and the seafloor alone, bypass the refineries and the pipelines and stop worrying that our families will accidentally be poisoned in the night. Instead, let's use the massive amounts of energy that are already right there for the taking, right beneath every building on earth.
Thank you.
