The Secret to Low Cost, Low Carbon Home Heating? Your Water Pipes — Episode 111 of Local Energy Rules Podcast

Podcast: Local Energy Rules
Source: whisper-base
Language: en
Duration: 2419s
URL: https://media.blubrry.com/localenergyrules/content.blubrry.com/localenergyrules/2020-8-ler111-jay-egg-water-main-geothermal.mp3
Fetched: 2026-03-03 04:09:52

The client is now paying $20, $30, $40 a month for the privilege of using BTU exchange with the water main and everybody's happy that water companies doubling their money because most water bills aren't that large anyway, they're $20, $30, $40 a month and so now they're doubling their money and they haven't had to add any major infrastructure. That's the 4.0 answer and that's essentially the way the best way I see to do this. Could the low carbon secret to building heating and cooling be under our streets? Geothermal energy literally means earth heat and it taps the near constant temperature of the ground several feet deep to heat or cool a building. Think of it like a refrigerator for your whole house keeping your home cool in the summer by pushing hot air outside or keeping your home warm in the winter by pushing cold air out. To tapping near constant temperatures underground geothermal energy systems can provide this benefit using much less energy than gas furnaces or boilers and they work for heating and cooling. Geothermal has had one drawback however it typically involves drilling deep holes to access these constant temperatures underground but what if it could tap an existing source under our streets? J. Egg, a geothermal consultant, writer, author and educator joined me in July 2020 to explain how we could tap city water means as a heating or cooling source for geothermal systems. Allowing homes and businesses to lower energy costs, carbon emissions and to increase revenue for city water utilities. I'm John Farrell, Director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and this is Local Energy Rules, a podcast sharing powerful stories about local renewable energy. Jay, welcome to Local Energy Rules. Well thank you for inviting me John, I'm glad to be here. We came across your name as we were looking into investigating this notion of using city water means as a heat source and source of energy for geothermal systems in part because there was a fascinating project that took place in New York doing this so using a water mean and you recently worked with the city of Onionta, New York on setting up a water mean geothermal project for a local hospital. Would you give us some background on what the city was hoping to do with the geothermal system that's connected to the water mean? I certainly can and I wondered do you have a good idea about the school that was put onto a water mean in New York in 2016? Would that be a good backstory in a few words? Yeah, please do give that backstory. I think it really when we talk about the Valley Stream School, the School of Valley Stream in New York that went on to a water mean, it kind of leads into this. So what happened is in 2015, this school whose water utility was named American Water got together with the New York Department of Regulation. It's the regulator for the utilities and I don't know if I said that particular acronym right. We got together with them and they decided that they wanted to do this water mean source system that would heat and cool this 40,000 square foot school simply by putting in the geothermal heat pumps and using the water mean as exchange for the heat pumps to heat and cool. The way they did that is they developed the plans and they cut into the water mean and they ran the water mean through an exchanger and through some pumps in an exchanger, a double wall titanium exchanger, they put it in a separate building and then they had a completely detached loop called the Condenser Water Loop that ran through and provided heat and removed heat from the building depending on the mode it was in to provide all of the heating and cooling for this school. This was a brilliant landmark project that had a lot of promise and it was actually funded for testing by Oak Ridge National Laboratories who completed their test in 2018 and actually the test is available online to anybody but the executive summary said that they found there was no reaction or situation with regard to the water, the puddle water coming out of the exchanger that would indicate any problems with doing puddle water exchange on any other systems. It was a remarkable 50 page report many of the folks in New York and clean heating and cooling were excited by it and they were looking at the potential for puddle water exchange to start picking up in other public buildings and municipalities throughout New York after this report came out in 2019 and that kind of brings us up to Onionta. So let me jump in really quick just for folks to understand why there's excitement about this which is when you normally do a geothermal project you're digging a big hole and you're laying a whole bunch of loops of heat transfer fluid like antifreeze in these loops underground and all that digging is expensive. You're either digging a really deep hole or you're digging a really wide field to do all these loops and the idea of using a water mean is you already have this thing that's underground that's at the right temperature and so you don't have to do all that extra digging, right? That's exactly right and that's part of what you said very well my emphasis or my focus is not to do the basic but to use some of the fluid that's part of what I term the water energy nexus to use fluid that's already moving beside or in the vicinity of a building and use it for dual purposes because it's not something that has not been done before this as a matter of fact and I really didn't want to get into this but I should mention just right now because it's perfect time in Toronto our neighbors just to the North in New York the city of Toronto has three main lines that go in there they want to say they're about 48 inches they go down into Lake Ontario and they pull in their water from the lake and treat it for drinking to become drinking water for the city of Toronto and the interesting thing about this is 15 years ago they put in a bank of exchangers and they run that drinking water after it's been treated through the exchangers which pre-chills the water for all of the downtown buildings 72,000 tons of exchange capacity that provides all the air conditioning for downtown so that's using potable water that's already been treated after it's been treated they run it through the exchangers then they send it on out to Ontarians to or Toronto to Ontarians for their potable drinking water so it's been operating 15 years and it's been operating so well they're actually tripling the size of that system too so it's not new it's just that if we're having a little trouble getting folks to come together on that that's why we were so excited when this happened in Valley Stream. This is super helpful I think because we have and we're going to get to this a little bit later a lot of cities around the United States that are really focused on how do we decarbonize our energy system how do we do low carbon heating and cooling geothermal sort of like down the list right now of things that people are thinking about but it's usually because of this issue of having to dig big holes and so it's fascinating to me that we not only have a recent example with this school but we have an example started 15 20 years ago and has already been doing this for a while for the exact purpose we're talking about so let's get back now finally to the the place where you've been working in Onionta about doing this water means geothermal project wonderful so first of all I did in Otsego I think it's called Otsego County there Onionta is one of the cities Cooperstown where the baseball hall of fame is one of the cities around there and all these little towns and villages are all kind of together as part of this Otsego Chamber of Commerce and where it really started was late in 2018 I think it was sometime mid 2018 I do a lot of speaking events and I was the keynote speaker for a clean energy thing going on there in Otsego at this conference where there were a lot of mayors there were a lot of city managers there were a lot of dignitaries from the local area there and I did a presentation on geothermal and one of the things that I and I shared a lot of the great things going on in New York one of the things I shared was this great story with this valley stream school that tied into a water man and the executives or the chief management officials with NYSERDA which is the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and that is the arm of New York that actually funds projects like this like municipal projects that are doing doing good things for energy and reducing emissions they were there because they have a clean heating and cooling division and they were very interested in what's going on with the potential for using water mains or puddle water to heat and cool buildings so as I talked about it it became a great subject of interest so lo and behold before too long I get a call from Oniata but Greg Matisse who's the city engineer George Cortauer who is another city engineer all got together with me and some of the folks from NYSERDA and said we are replacing a water main running down through Main Street in our town where we've already contracted to do it do you think there is a way that we could use since we're opening up the street this water main to help install a geothermal capacity for the buildings long Main Street everybody agreed that that was a great idea to investigate so they hired us they put us under contract the city of Oniata and you mentioned you've seen the headline on that and we went under contract and began this study where we ran into a problem was everything was fine until it got to the New York Department of Health they have some clause and I wrote this actually in an article in plumbing engineer see the DOH pushes back the New York Department of Health has a regulation that was shared by Roger Sokol the director of the New York Division of Environmental Health Protection in May 2019 that prohibits the introduction of puddle water after heat exchange it's the obscure rule and I say it's obscure I'm sure there's a reason for it I'm sure somebody did something wrong sometime in the last several decades that made that rule come into being but nonetheless it says it he states that a direct cross connection is a direct contradiction to what they call and this is an actual thing the 10 state standards and contradicts the US Environmental Protection Agency's guidance in document WSG-170 it went on to say that Jeffrey Snyder director of Environmental Health at Madison County Department of Health notes that part 8.10.2 of the 10th state standard does not allow water use and conjunction with heat exchangers to be returned to the public water system and that's when I say a little bit tongue-in-cheek in my article I said perhaps somebody should tell that to Toronto since they're doing it and they've been doing it for 15 years very effectively so what that comes down to what that argument comes down to John is they're saying they will not allow potable water to be exchanged with a refrigeration system and continue to be potable in other words it has to be thrown away I pushed back a little bit and I haven't gotten an answer to this yet but I said let's talk about a drinking fountain on the wall that goes to refrigeration and you allow people to drink from it let's talk about a domestic hot water tank that uses it's a heat recovery tank that has the compressor on the top they're selling by thousands now that uses a compressor and exchanger to heat that water you want to go even larger you let's talk about ice machines potable that's potable solid water ice machines go through a refrigeration process and we're allowed to drink it so there are potable water refrigeration systems there are thousands of systems that have been rated by NSF what they really need to do is look at the specifics of what happened because probably if I had to guess what happened that created this rule that prohibits the introduction of potable water after heat exchange is probably where somebody did it in their backyard I'm not suggesting and nor is anybody else suggesting that people are allowed to take potable water necessarily into their home do their exchange and bring it back no what we're wanting to do is let the potable water authority do their heat exchange kind of like it was done at Valley Stream there was a separate exchange or building that exchange and it's controlled by the water department it's a completely controlled process they use the water they exchange it and they send it back into the water main that's exactly what Toronto does this is what we were trying to do in the onion to situation I just want to you to clarify too for folks on this because what I find so fascinating about it is maybe something that people when you you mentioned the word exchange or like I can picture what a heat exchanger is for other folks just think about a refrigerator right so we're talking about the stuff on the back of your refrigerator that runs through those coils is never in your refrigerator it's never getting in mixed in with your food and the same thing is true of these systems the water is never leaving the pipe the water main pipe to be tampered with you're literally just wrapping a piece of metal around it to extract the heat from it so this regulation has nothing to do with how people might be sticking their fingers in the water they're never touching it it has to do with as you're saying with kind of who manages that heat exchange on who's property it's happening and some of these other issues and I guess there's another issue too that is mentioned that was researched in that study you mentioned too about heat and how that might impact the water but we're not talking about anybody contaminating the water supply by running it out into a cup and pouring it back in and now it's going to someone else's house right and that is what is so important to understand it's not being tampered with by anyone in every situation including Toronto and including Valley Stream this is a water department controlled exchange process and as a matter of fact if they would open their minds and this is the hardest thing to do for authorities having jurisdiction it takes a lot of work to do this it takes a lot of work to actually open your mind to get a process going but these are the things that change the world when people will step up and do it when I say it takes a lot of work they have to understand when I say a lot of work it's not the engineering they just have to understand it and have a competent new verbiage put into their codes to show how it's done in this case we would borrow verbiage from what they did at Valley Stream or we would borrow verbiage from what they did in Toronto or any number of other places as a matter of fact I was so impressed to see that when I first met you I had talked to your assistant Lily Amber and she had sent me something I didn't even know anything about the Energy Policy Act of 1992 public law 102-486 October 24th says on geothermal heat pumps it says encourage states municipalities counties and townships to consider allowing the installation of geothermal heat pumps to permit public and private water recipients to utilize the flow of water from and back into public and private water means for the purpose of providing sufficient water supply for operation of residential geothermal heat pumps that is the perfect 4.0 solution but I understand where water departments might not want that to happen inside the space they would want to control it outside but that's the that's a perfect law that in my opinion could be very effectively used if they just use a an NSF approved appliance that does this exchange because then they can certify there's nothing happening to it but again the projects that I've seen approved in a large scale involve water company managed facilities and the water company ends up selling they don't only sell the water but they also sell the BTUs from the water when it does the heating and cooling so they have two income streams then and they're doing a benefit to the clients we're going to take a short break when we come back I asked Jay whether water main geothermal would work for homes and how the city's water utility would play a role we also explore what he calls the water energy nexus discussing other ways that we can capture the energy and water systems from gray water to wastewater to power our economy hey thanks for listening to local energy rules if you've made it this far you're obviously a fan and we could use your help for just two minutes as you've probably 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vids and building local power thanks again for listening now back to the program we've spent a few minutes now talking about this particular project the very ran into at the health department and kind of how it works and and the rationale for this like this is worth investigating of course because it makes geothermal cheaper to do you've got this ready resource that's already flowing instead of having to make your own loopfield and bore big holes in the ground we have cities there's over a hundred cities now in the united states that have made commitments on some timeline to a hundred percent renewable energy sometimes it's just electricity but most of the time it's all energy sources so they're thinking about building heating and cooling and right now we've got especially in the northern part of the country most homes are being heated with natural gas which is relatively inexpensive because we don't count pollution impacts and the price that we pay for it obviously and so it's hard to find stuff to replace it that is affordable and this seems to me to be a perfect candidate not only because you have a technology that would allow people to lower their carbon emissions and do it affordably but because most cities own their own water department already and where they can't regulate the gas utility in fact there are big political fights around this right now they do own a water department and gosh darn it cities probably need some money too and like you just said they have an opportunity to make money selling heat energy if they ran this kind of system so let's just talk a little bit about what would be involved in a city doing this kind of system let's just say they wanted to start with a pilot a few blocks of residential property can they just use the water main that's there do they have to do it with a water main upgrade how would a city get started on this what they would do and this is a model that we've looked at you know how each home or each apartment complex has a water meter out front it's usually in a concrete box or something like that that box would if would be a perfect place because that's owned by the water department be a perfect place for one of these exchanges to be put in that would be owned by the water company and so it would be an upgrade it would be something perfectly engineered and it would have the capacity to exchange with the water main all of the all the heating and cooling needs for the geothermal heat pump in the building what would change with the building is they would still have their water main coming in their water line coming in but then two other lines would be added off of this exchanger and they'd just be trenched up to the building and stubbed in significantly less than the 15,000 or 20,000 dollar investment that's needed for for ground loops this would probably be somewhere in the neighborhood a one or two thousand dollar investment for the water company which they wouldn't even need to charge for because now they're selling BTUs to the client the client is now paying 20 30 40 dollars a month for the privilege of using BTU exchange with the water main and everybody's happy that water companies doubling their money because most water bills aren't that large anyway they're 20 30 40 dollars a month and and so now they're doubling their money and they haven't had to add any major infrastructure that's the 4.0 answer and that's essentially the way the best way I see to do this let me just give you an example and I stuck with this of course because I have a house in Minneapolis so my water meter that measures how much I use is actually inside my house okay but I know there's also a shut off valve in the sidewalk right between my house in the street so where in that could they put it in my house would they put it under the street like where would they put that exchanger if they knew they could always get into your house to deal with any emergencies I would say put it in your house but knowing the authorities are having jurisdiction that I've dealt with they would probably want to put a concrete box in the ground right there that had the exchanger in it right in line with the water coming into your house and they would put the exchanger there and that would have the BTU meter or the GPM meter for what you're doing for your heat pump so they would have to put something big enough to hold an exchanger that can exchange the number of BTUs in your house which is not going to be that big a typical exchanger might be the size of a I wish I had a picture to show you right now but there might be 12 to 14 inches high and 12 to 14 inches wide and about 8 to 10 inches thick so this is what one of these exchangers looks like and they have the water main pipes coming in one side and then they would have the in and out pipes from the geothermal coming out the other side and it would just be in a simple vault and if this were a video or a visual I could show you what one looks like but that's what they would do at each house in the simplest forms and that would work in your house and then tell me about what the customer would need to do so let's just say the water utility they get on board with this they're offering to do this installation for customers customers now got a heat exchanger whether it's in the street in their house they've got they've got access to BTUs now that they can supply their house just like they would and that coming through the gas line for example just in a different form right what equipment does the customer need to take advantage of this if you imagine what a a forster furnace looks like which a lot of people have that use natural gas they would exchange that purchase a geothermal heat pump which normally fits in the same footprint of a forster furnace that geothermal heat pump uses electricity just like a forster furnace to drive the fan and the compressor so they would put it in place hook up the electrical service and then the pipes for that would normally go to a ground loop would now tie into that exchanger and a small circulator would be put in a micro horse power circulator just to circulate the water between the heat pump and the exchanger with the water main so that would be all it would be needed in the house no drilling no loop fields outside just tying into the the pipes that have been run in or are available from the water company now and you're if you're talking about a house that has central air conditioning too you can actually replace both with this system right it's gonna heat in cool yes absolutely if you if you are familiar with this many of the forster furnaces have an air conditioning coil in them if they have air conditioning too it's a combination unit that unit it can be completely replaced with a geothermal heat pump because it does both heating and cooling and in addition to that and they have the domestic hot water generator option that can provide a good portion of the hot water needed in a home we've talked a lot about what the city would need to do for this are there any kinds of engineering or other challenges so we when we talked about the health department issue in New York their concern was I think largely around just they had this regulation and as you mentioned it might have had some to do with someone messing with it on their own private property before now everything's being controlled by the water utility it's all kind of locked up and away from the customer's hands the only other concern that I have read anything about is this issue of every time a customer tapping into the water main draws out a little bit of heat the water that gets sent back is a little bit colder obviously because and so I guess my question is if you're the 20th house in a row on that water main that wants to do this is the water still have enough heat in it for you to take are you ever going to freeze the water in the water main and is that the only other kind of issue that we would need to confront there's definitely a master engineering concern here the primary part of this that is the most important is figuring out what is an approved way for water utilities nationally to do this and we just talked about some of those opportunities and it's very easy to do it just gets approved by you well it gets approved by NSF and it's an appliance it's a package that becomes the exchanger that gets installed so the next question you just mentioned is an infrastructure question is there enough water going through there to handle the heating and cooling load that is overwhelming yes in most situations the amount of water used per household per day is usually far more than enough is it moving at the right time is there a possibility when everybody's got it on freezing it certainly there is and that's something that each jurisdiction would have iron engineering firm like mine or somebody else it does master plan engineering and they would look at the consumption for that city or that or that township and they would look at the potential BTU exchange and find those thresholds where there's going to be problems and that and rather than saying this won't work because there's not enough water flow what happens in many of these situations because we've already modeled them is if you don't have enough water flow going by you put pumps in and you turn and you close the ends of the lines and you start circulating them in a circuit where it keeps the water moving at a at a great enough rate so that they can it can be used for geothermal exchange or heat exchange so that's not the case in nearly all of the situations but in the most extreme intensive situations that may need to happen and there haven't been extensive studies done on that because there hasn't been a real there has not been a real effort to make this possible or plausible for the individual municipalities the answer is it's absolutely doable they just have to we just have to look at each one individually and the most that's going to happen is they're going to have to modify some of the piping to get to keep flow continually going through the water mains and that will be more than compensated for by the amount of energy they'll be selling to the customers they'll probably be doubling their income just because they're selling BTUs now and doing a great service to the industry. I had a question for you about kind of the economic and environmental benefits I think we've covered these pretty well I just want to rattle off a summary here and then see if you use anything that I've missed but we're talking about you know we're going from a fossil fuel system that provides the BTUs so now we're just getting the BTUs from a benign source from the water main you're probably cost competitive with natural gas given that you're just having to pay for energy through this heat exchanger and not an actual fuel you have to burn for the customer you've got a water utility that can actually make money now competing with the gas company or whoever else is selling energy for this you are going to use some more electricity to operate your heat pump then then you did like when you're burning gas for a gas furnace but you don't need you know relative to how much you need energy use you need to do for natural gas for example you actually to burn and consume all of that fuel plus you need electricity to push it around the house in your forced air furnace example here you're really only using the electric energy to run the exchanger and then and to push the air through the house so I get all that pretty close you did you did and it's just to bring a home an electric heat pump is exactly that it's no different really than a water pump if you think about a water pump it's a device it's used to pump water from one place to another and a heat pump is exactly that so it's an electrically driven device that is used to extract heat out of fluid streams and so that's what it does in this case this heat pump is extracting heat from the water main in the summertime it's rejecting heat into the water main so there's a little given take and that's all it's doing is exchanging heat kind of like if you take your hand and hold it against a soda your hand gets cold your hand did not become a soda you didn't get any soda on your hand you just exchange heat with that right and so that's exactly as far as the economics of it the natural gas is a consumable they have to bring in more natural gas the more that is burned and of course it's got the CO2 emissions this is not a consumable this is something that is completely renewable it's just be to use in be to use out of a commodity we're already using which doesn't affect anything adversely and the cost for the natural gas furnace is about the same as what it costs to pay the electricity to run a heat pump to heat a building the fact of the matter is you can't use natural gas to cool the building so you've got the air conditioner now air conditioning function to do that and if you compare the cost of a standard air conditioner to a geothermal source air conditioner it's far less it's about 60 percent of what an air source air conditioner charges so overall your energy bill goes down significantly now if you looked at natural gas where it was 10 years ago 12 years ago it would be one third the cost because natural gas was much more expensive and probably will go up again and that's fuel that's price volatility of fossil fuels so with electricity you don't really worry about that because it's a pretty stable energy source and it's part of what the United States and most states in the United States are doing and it's part of our beneficial electrification goals which will get us in harmony with the emissions reduction goals I wanted to at least ask you one question about something you talk about in your writing what you call the water energy nexus which discusses the overlap between water and energy use and it seems like this is a perfect illustration of how maybe people haven't thought about that before one of the I've heard of this before in the context of we use a lot of energy to pump water so whether it's for agriculture and irrigation or just pumping water for homes out of aquifers or for wells but tell me a little bit more about like how you see this intersection of water and energy and how this is playing a role in that I want to start with the very simplest overview water and energy are coupled because water is the best fluid on earth including every other chemical combination it's the best fluid on earth to effectively move BTUs I hadronic system which is a system of pipes that have water in them move energy around a building more effectively in the form of BTUs than then refrigerant or any other or ductwork or anything so right away we understand that water moves BTUs very effectively when we're talking about the water energy nexus the first and most obvious thing is if you have a structure next to a river that river is is part of the water energy nexus all you have to do is put your devices your air conditioning exchangers to exchange heat with that and it will provide all the heating and cooling you need as a matter of fact the UK did a study that surface water in the United Kingdom would handle all the needs for heating and cooling for all of their for 80% of their population 100% at the time just because of proximity and the amount of water now beyond that we just talked about the city water mains and the potential if the waters moving anyway once again you have a BTU stream where it really doesn't matter you might as well use it for removing BTUs or adding BTUs to homes when you get into big cities and other applications in New York for example they are constantly dewatering the subways there are millions of gallons per minute of water being pumped out of subways and down the streets and into the east river and into the Hudson river that water and this is something we're working on right now with New York City and the MTA can be run through buildings and colleges and so forth and provide all their heating and cooling exchange needs for the entire building for the chillers and you keep going along on this if you I live in Florida we have sprinklers going all the time those sprinklers are part of what we call the gray water system we have actually two pipelines running down our street that have semi-pottable water one is gray water it's only used for irrigation and that's water that's gone to the waste treatment that water could be used for exchange another thing as part of the water energy nexus is it's been proven that wastewater in the U.S. wastewater that goes down the drain includes 350 billion kilowatt hours a year of energy we've paid the heat think about all the showers we take think about all the dishes we wash the laundry we do all that is energy we've paid the heat and all we need to do is extract the heat from it and it sounds like a gross thing but it's a huge energy recovery segment of the of the of the industry now because a company called wastewater energy systems out of Vancouver has gone public and they're doing city-based systems that provide all the heat needed for entire cities just off of their wastewater plants and they actually created a device that hooks up to an apartment building and it strips the heat out of all the wastewater before it goes into the main sewer pipes and can provide all of the domestic hot water needs for an entire apartment complex just off of that waste heat I could go on and on about this but this water energy nexus is just about and if I were to show you a picture of under a street you'd see gray water wastewater storm water potable water that goes to anything that's any fluid that's moving by as the potential to exchange heat with the buildings and stop wasting these resources we have right in front of us let me ask you one question about the wastewater because that's fascinating to me if we're talking about a water utility building installing an appliance in my home to tap for heat is there an opportunity to have an appliance that taps both of those resources yes or would it be sort of silly because one's cold and one's warmer no it would probably in the perfect world there are a lot of things that we we conceive of right now that we go wow that's going to take a lot of engineering but in the perfect world the more perfect world we're coming into these type of things become easily engineered and they become just an appliance it's just a heat recovery appliance that strips the water out of the heat out of your water coming in the house strips the heat out of the water going out of the house it could be one one device and all it happens is the contractors that install your home that they have this energy recovery device that's required by code now and it provides all of the waste heat that you need to operate your heat pump that's the perfect answer if a if a device is made that can strip it all out then you become a more energy conscious home because you're not wasting heat coming in or out of your home yeah I just want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me about all of this it's been great before I let you go what should cities do if they want to learn more about doing geothermal on the water mean they should study what they've done in Toronto they can google egg geo and I'll tell them anything about it but if they just want to read an article I just did this because of my whole situation I ran into with New York and I wrote an article portable water thermal exchange is opening opportunities that's where I wrote about what they're doing in Toronto what they did in Valley Stream and the and the dead end I ran into temporarily with the New York Department of Health I was very kind didn't put it thrown anybody into the bus but I said this is what we can do this is what we have to get passed and it's got everything in there that I think an entry level person would want to see they can see how it's done and where some of the stop gaps are right now that we can we need to get passed great well we'll have a link to that article in our show notes Jay thanks again really appreciate your time thank you so much John this has been such a pleasure and this is John Farrell director of ILSR's energy democracy initiative I was speaking with Jay egg a geothermal consultant writer author and educator about the opportunity to tap city water means to deliver low carbon and low cost heating and cooling to homes and businesses you can get an overview of water main geothermal and an article by Jay called potable water thermal exchange is opening opportunities linked on our show page you can also find more information on the ILSR website where we explain the concept and share the story of Toronto discussed in the interview while you're at our website reviewing this and other resources you can also find more than 100 past episodes of the local energy rules podcast until next time keep your energy local and thanks for listening