Wind Turbine Heat Pump (Geothermal Transfer) For The Home

I am a lawyer who has been interested in the subject of energy conservation since the seventies. Back when we had the first OPEC crisis, I thought this country would head in a direction away from the consumption of huge quantities of oil and gas. It didn't happen. Now of course, our thirst for oil has been the primary reason for a preemptive war with no end in sight. Moreover, peak oil seems to be here. And so far nothing much seems to have changed. But the public, may at last be ready for something different.

There are some real promising things happening with new solar energy systems and with wind turbines. It is long past due. But I still keep wondering whether we are approaching this problem of solving our energy demands the right way. With both solar and wind systems all technology seems to be headed toward the creation of electricity. Electricity is definitely useful but often inefficient.

Heating and cooling costs are about 60-70 percent of home energy costs. It is far more cost effective to use heat transfer than to make heat. Water source heat pumps are 300-400 percent efficient while the best ordinary HVAC systems might be forty percent efficient. (Are they that much?) What if you could even vastly surpass the efficiency of a water source heat pump. How? By making the wind pump the water instead of an electric pump.

Why not use wind to its best advantage? Make the wind do what it has done very efficiently for hundreds of years: pump water. Make it pump water from a warm place to a cold place and make it store the heat where the heat is needed or wanted. In the winter pump the heat from under the ground into the house. In the summer pump the heat from house into the ground.
To do this, because of the wind's variability, one would need a huge (?) thermal sink in the house to slowly release the heat transferred from underground to the heat sink or to transfer the heat from the house to the ground while the wind was not blowing.

A four part system. A wind turbine. A pump. A closed loop of pipe. An interior thermal sink.

It is fairly well known that in most climates, five or six feet below ground, the temperature is a about 55 degrees. I think it is quite possible to take advantage of the geothermal underground temperature by using a wind turbine to pump water from underground into an interior thermal sink. If a large enough volume of water could be circulated to where the interior heat sink reached 55 degrees, I think such a home's heating and cooling costs would be drastically reduced.

If the large thermal sink could get the house temperature substantially raised in the winter and substantially cooled in the summer, very little additional energy might be required to bring it to a desirable temperature with the use of a water source heat pump. A water source heat pump would work in tandem very well by using the internal heat sink as a convenient source to operate a water source heat pump.

My idea would be to use a vertical wind turbine on the roof coupled to an Archimedes screw to pumps and circulates water through the closed loop. The vertical wind turbines seem to need less wind, have more torque, and are quieter. I also think that from an architectural point of view, they would look much more attractive, especially the ones that look like spinnerets. They also take advantage of a sloping roof which increases wind speed.

I also think the Archimedes screw would be an ideal pump. It requires no gears or lubrication and could attach by a straight shaft to the vertical wind turbine. An Archimedes screw would be very inexpensive as pumping systems go and extremely reliable as there is really nothing to break.

I have other ideas about roof design and about turbine design for greater efficiency. I also have ideas about the plumbing. What I would like to see is whether there are people out there who think this idea has commercial merit and if so, how we might go about making wind driven water pumping for geothermal transfer a success. We would need some engineering and architectural expertise and some ability to fabricate the wind turbines and pumps.

I look forward to responses.