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

And the way they did that is they develop the plans and they cut into the water main and they ran the water main through it and exchanger and threw some pumps in an exchanger double-walled titanium exchanger. They put it in a separate building and then they had a, 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. And 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. The test is available online to anybody. The executive summary said that they found there was no reaction or situation with regard to the potable water coming out of the exchanger that would indicate any problems with doing potable water exchange on any other systems. So, it was a remarkable 50-page report. Many of the folks in New York in clean, heating and cooling were excited by it. And they were looking at the potential for potable 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 Oneonta.

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 preaches 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 Toronto enhanced for their potable drinking water. So it’s, 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, and that’s why we were so excited when this happened in Valley Stream.

And that is the arm of New York that funds projects like this like municipal projects that are 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 potable water to heat and cool buildings. As I talked about it, it became a great subject of interest.

So, lo and behold, before too long, I get a call from Oneonta, Greg Mattice is the city engineer and George Korthauer, who was 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 this since we’re opening up the street, this water main to help install a geothermal capacity for the buildings along Main Street?”

Everybody agreed that that was a great idea to investigate that. So they hired us, they put us under contract with the city of Oneonta. And, you mentioned you’ve seen the headline on that. 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 —and plumbing engineer, let’s see the DOH pushes back. The New York Department of Health has a regulation that was shared by Roger. Sokal the Director of the New York Division of Environmental Health Protection in May 2019 that prohibits the introduction of potable water after heat exchange. It’s this 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 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 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s guidance in document WSG one 17. It went on to say that Jeffrey Snyder director of Environmental Health and Madison County Department of Health notes, that part 8.10.2 of the “10 State Standard” does not allow water use in 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 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 the 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 through 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 the 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. Blend in line was done at Valley Stream. There was a separate exchange or building that exchange. And it’s a 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 Oneonta situation.

As a matter of fact, I was so impressed to see that when I first met you, I had talked to your assistant Lilli Ambort, 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 encouraged 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 mains 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 a perfect law that in my opinion, and could be very effectively used if they just use 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 not 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.

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We’ve spent a few minutes now talking about this particular project that barrier you ran into at the health department and kind of how it works. 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 loop field 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 100%  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?

And they would look at the consumption for that city or that, uh, or that township. And they would look at the potential BTU exchange and find those thresholds where there’s going to be problems. And rather than saying, this won’t work because there’s not enough water flow. What happens in many of these situations, cause 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, 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 and dense of situations that may need to happen. And there haven’t been extensive studies done on that because there hasn’t been a real, uh, there has not been a real effort to make this possible or plausible for the individual municipalities. The answer is it’s absolutely doable. 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.

And so that’s exactly it. 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 then of course, it’s got the CO2 emissions. This is not a consumable. This is something that is completely renewable. It’s just BTUs in and BTUs 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 the air conditioning function to do that. And if you compare the cost of a standard air conditioner to a geothermal sourced air conditioner, it’s far less, it’s about 60% of what an air source air conditioner charges.

Now, beyond that, we just talked about the city water mains and the potential. If the water’s 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 BTS to homes. When you get into big cities and other applications in New York, for example, they are constantly, de-watering 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 it’s just 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 again, 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 semis potable water. One is gray water it’s only used for, and that’s water. That’s gone through the waste treatment that water could be used for exchange. Another thing that’s 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 of that is energy. We 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. A segment 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 would see gray water, wastewater, stormwater, potable water—that goes to anything that’s fluid is moving by has the potential to exchange heat with the buildings and stop wasting these resources we have right in front of us.