RESILIENT COMMUNITY: Community Geothermal

For those of you that don't know, I'm working on a book entitled "The Resilient Community." Essentially, it's about how a shift to local production and distribution of nearly everything can create a stable place to live, work, and raise a family (seen from the top down, it is a self-organizing alternative to a dysfunctional global system). The one problem that has plagued me over the last two years is how do we build local platforms that make resilience possible when communities are in financial distress -- proliferation of foreclosures (gutting the community), incomes in decline to the global lowest common denominator/norm (which is a likely equilibrium point for this crisis), and negative cash flow (debt >> income). One solution I have formulated is to use of volunteers to build platforms that can radically reduce ongoing expenses for community members (it's community judo). A potential candidate that fits this is a community geothermal effort.

Geothermal Heating/Cooling

More than half of all energy usage (not cars and not electricity) is dedicated to heating and cooling of structures (homes and businesses). This expense can be radically reduced by using geothermal heat (50-70 percent). Here's how it works:

• The ground below ~6 feet stays at a relatively constant temperature between 40 degrees and 60 degrees F, depending on the area in which you live.
  
• If you drill a well (the most efficient method to tap geothermal), you can insert a plastic pipe that allows you to pump anti-freeze fluid into the hole. This system, which costs VERY little to operate, uses the earth's energy to either heat or cool the fluid to the geographies standard temperature. The system is nearly maintenance free.
  
• Warmed water from the geothermal system can be used to make heat-pumps very efficient. Cooled water from the system can be used, with a forced air fan, to cool a home.

How it works

The biggest expense in any geothermal system is drilling the wells. Costs are excessive (and can run to $10,000 a home). Fortunately, a volunteer effort very much like a local fire department can accomplish this at a small fraction of this cost. Elements include:

• Drilling rig. Excellent used drilling trucks sell between $50-100 thousand. Leases are much less. There are open source alternatives that can cost MUCH less in the works.
  
• Training. For most communities, the level of training necessary to run drilling equipment fast and efficiently isn't difficult.
  
• Financing of in-house heating/cooling equipment to connect to ground loop stub. Relatively low cost. Community discounts possible. Payback in measured in a handful of years.
  

Where to start?

The best place to start with a community geothermal effort is with a community property, most likely K-12 schools. This focus would allow the community to generate the funds required to purchase the equipment and train the volunteers as well as pay back the expense quickly. After that common effort is accomplished, volunteer properties (with requirements for contribution) would be the first beneficiaries of drilling efforts, the follow-ons would be based on lottery and so on until all participatory homes/buildings are brought online. Small ongoing contributions from participatory homes, with volunteers exempt, would pay ongoing expenses.

Comments

[Duncan Kinder]

"One solution I have formulated is to use of volunteers to build platforms that can radically reduce ongoing expenses for community members (it's community judo). A potential candidate that fits this is a community geothermal effort."

This is how, in colonial times, people used to raise barns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_raising

"A Barn raising is an event during which a community comes together to assemble a barn for one or more of its households, particularly in 18th- and 19th-century rural North America. In the past, a barn was often the first, largest, and most costly structure built by a family who settled in a new area. Barns were essential structures for storage of hay and keeping of horses and cattle, which in those days were an inseparable part of farming. The tradition of "barn raising" continues, more or less unchanged, in some Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities, particularly in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and some rural parts of Canada. The practice continues outside of these religious communities, albeit less frequently than in the 19th century, in the U.S. states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Wisconsin."

[RanDomino]

First you observed that nation-states are obsolete. Now you observe that capitalism ought to be obsolete. You've got to realize that other people are way ahead of you, although you've learned for your whole life to hate us.

[John Robb]

Ran, obsolete isn't really the right word for it. Both are failing, not completely but sufficiently, for different reasons.

Second, not sure who I was trained to hate. I am very sure you don't know anything about me.

[Adam D. Schneider]

I'm starting to worry that your book is going to be a day late and a dollar short. Better get it out the door quick!

[John Robb]

Adam,

Actually, this crisis is going to last a loooong time. RCs are going to take quite a bit of time to launch. Not sure that the timing is really going to matter all that much. Regardless, it would have better to get it out earlier than later.

[roamer]

John Robb,
I don't know much about economics but this crisis certainly doesn't seem to be going slowly to me. Looks like barring a huge coordinated intervention all but the most vital sectors of our economy will remain. What then? Millions unemployed and broke or worse in debt. This seems like a perfect segway for mass entry into evolving resilent communities.
It looks like a depression so the actual raw materials for constructing RC's should be cheap all that is needed are some forerunners to start laying down bluepritns and examples on how to do it. Have you been following Open Source Ecologies efforts http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Main_Page, they certainly are agressive and fast.

[gmoke]

Here's a solar air heater that we barnraised back in 1980
http://solarray.blogspot.com/2008/09/old-solar-1980-barnraised-solar-air.html

These days, in the same neighborhoods, we are doing monthly energy conservation barnraisings. At the next one, we'll be putting together a windowbox solar air heater.

Geothermal can also fit into district heating but the first barnraised geothermal unit is going to take a lot of work to get past the town authorities.

[complexfatwa]

John,

Perhaps a bit off-topic, but will your book include a critique of Bobbitt's Market-state interpretation of nation-state decline, with a rigorous formal establishment of your ideas on the Hollow-state? Perhaps also an in-depth outline of what you've called the 'thermodynamic crisis'?

I ask this because while resilience has had an audience among the Peak Oil/resource depletion community for quite a while, I'm having a hard time getting those who maintain cornucopian or 20th Century Legacy mindsets (i.e. most people) to take seriously the idea of systemic disorder and decline in virtually all our institutions. Many people have a hard time conceptualizing the big picture trends that will really effect their security and survival, especially if they have psychological blinders or poor information synthesis skills.

An extended-form fleshing out of the topics mentioned in the first paragraph would go a long way towards providing a more complete picture of our macro-level situation, in all its socio-political-economic manifestations, taking the imperative for RCs beyond the limited scope of ecological sustainability and expanding its audience to those who might otherwise be adverse to what might (erroneously) look like hippie communalism.

[John Robb]

CF, YES! Also, the resilient community isn't about returning to the lifestyle of the 19th Century nor is it about communal living. It is about community interconnectedness to at first prevent community failure and over the longer term radical improvements in wealth generation/quality of life at a MUCH lower cost basis (from monetary to environmental to psychological).

[tim302]

John,
Glad to see you going in this direction. I think in some ways the organizational structures and practices are the real key. The technology is developing, but the practices and procedures to use it still are.

For example-- say a cul-de-sac wants to get in on community geothermal. How do they organize it? There are still going to be jurisdictional issues, unless you are foreseeing some kind of Mad Max situation...and I don't think that's too likely. How do they do dispute resolution? Disputes are inevitable-- look at HOAs, where most people are unhappy with their HOA experience.

So, there have to be structures to help facilitate the resilient community technology.

[tim302]

*still are too.

[John Galt]

Cutting edge solutions are always sold to the Lifestyle crowd. I don't own a mountain with great sniper nests because I'm a hippy. Though I am a hippy. Kinda.

The unneeded drama about hippies and collectivism is something that has been going on for atleast the past 20 years since I've been a student of this approach to adaptation. It's like convincing a right-winger they shouldn't feed lead to their kids even though lead mining is an important source of economic activity.

(Fur Amurica! Hell Yah!)

Oh, and geothermal isn't the best model to use for large-scale projects. Schools are perhaps the worst for technical reasons yet best for social reasons. Technically, schools are aleady important Homelund Securituh assets thus will have co-generators on site. Anyone with a local generator can tell you passive thermal like solar or geothermal heat pumps are wasteful. The ratio of electricity to heat by-product is extremely wasteful, not to mention all the bioheat from people in the building. For schools the best thermal solutions will be energy recovery ventilation and hydronic cooling e.g. the huge olympic pool bottom and septic systems.

Volunters are still important, but we call them charitable risk capital. Somebody needs to jump first. John, you can purchase a cheap share in our LLC co-op network. You can buy a share of a farm (sleeping bunk and garden bed you can work) with the main benefit of not being shot when you walk on the property after civilization crashes.* We have near 200 farms in agreement so far. Nobody knows where the safe place will be, just like usual crop insurance bets, so we just run it like a church bingo.

* I personally offer the value-added service of actually shooting the zombies if they're chasing after you up the farm road. :-)

ps You still need to learn to hate the military pigs you once (?) worked for. Maybe take some tryptamine.