Imagine a 200-pound human traveling by elevator from the 5th floor to the lobby. That is a lot of energy potential that isn’t getting captured. Your descent should be turning a generator or compressing gas or doing something else to power the grid.
How hard could that be?
I also wonder why homes in California aren’t designed to make better use of the stable temperature ten feet beneath the house. It’s always cooler down there during the hot summer. It’s like sitting on a free air conditioner and not using it.
Suppose you dig a ten foot hole, with a ten foot diameter, and fill the hole with a thermal mass that absorbs the surrounding temperature and bleeds it into the thermal mass of the home’s flooring. Wouldn’t that keep the home a lot cooler?
There might be times you wanted to turn off the effect, so I suppose you could engineer it so an insulating layer is applied when needed.
I realize geothermal heating systems are used in cold climates. They just aren’t economical in California because we don’t have the cold extremes.
I remember going into a house in California years ago on a hot summer day and being surprised that the homeowners didn’t need any air conditioning. They had a large attic fan that was drawing out the hot air. Since then I have noticed in a few places I lived that a fan is unnecessary if you have a window in the top floor open and one on the ground floor. The “chimney effect” brings warm air up and out so efficiently the fan is redundant. The only problem is that you don’t want to go to bed with a downstairs window open. That’s why I invented the Jailer Screen Window. It’s a ground floor window you can open, but still has jailer bars to keep out humans, and a screen to keep out bugs. Open that bad boy before bedtime, along with the windows upstairs, and you won’t need AC in the evening.
Okay, I didn’t invent the Jailer Screen Window. But I did give it a cool name.
I often think the energy crisis is a failure of imagination.
[As usual with my posts, I get two types of comments: 1) It will never work, and 2) It is already being done. — Scott]