From the “especially if the EV’s are on fire” department…
The heat given off by car engines warms up underground car parks in such a way that the heat passes through the ground into the groundwater. In Berlin alone, enough energy is transferred to the groundwater to supply 14,660 households with heat. This finding was made by a team from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and the University of Basel. According to the researchers, this warming could have long-term effects on groundwater quality. In their study, published in the journal Science of The Total Environment, they also propose a solution. Using geothermal energy and heat pumps, the heat could be extracted from the ground and utilized.
The researchers examined temperatures in 31 underground car parks in various cities throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In six of them, they were also able to measure the temperature of the groundwater in the immediate vicinity. This allowed a heat profile to be created for all locations. Their investigations showed that underground car parks heat up the groundwater throughout the year. The volume of traffic in the underground car parks, their proximity to the groundwater and ambient groundwater temperatures were the biggest influencing factors. “Public underground car parks heat up the groundwater more than private facilities as they are often deeper and the cars park there for shorter periods of time,” explains Maximilian Noethen, a geoscientist from MLU.
According to the team, geothermal energy and heat pumps could help utilise the excess heat in the ground. “This would have the advantage of extracting energy from the groundwater and thus cooling it down,” says Noethen. Based on modelling for 5,040 underground car parks in Berlin, the team calculated groundwater warming from the underground car parks for the city. Since many underground car parks in the central districts of the capital are located in or near groundwater, a particularly large amount of heat is transferred to the groundwater there. According to their calculations, around 0.65 petajoules of energy are emitted annually in Berlin. This could theoretically supply around 14,660 households with heat. “Of course, heat from groundwater alone is not enough to cover the heating needs of a city like Berlin or even a country like Germany. Nor are the temperature levels of the groundwater near the surface high enough to provide heat without a heat pump. However, we do know from previous studies that the potential for geothermal energy goes well beyond this and that it could make a significant contribution to supplying sustainable heat,” says Professor Peter Bayer from the Institute of Geosciences and Geography at MLU.
Groundwater temperatures have been rising for decades as a result of global warming. In cities, this is exacerbated by dense urban development, soil sealing, lack of vegetation and heat radiating directly from tunnels and underground car parks. Since the organisms in the groundwater are adapted to constant temperatures, species composition could also change. “This could affect the quality of the groundwater from which we draw large parts of our drinking water. This development needs to be controlled through a variety of measures,” concludes Bayer.
The study was funded by the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU) and the Margarete von Wrangell Program of the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of the State of Baden-Württemberg.
Study: Noethen M. et al. Thermal impact of underground car parks on urban groundwater. Science of The Total Environment (2023). doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.166572
This reminds me of CARB, the California Air Resources Board. Anything they can count they will try to ban.
A mark of civilization is running water. A mark of modern civilization is heated running water. Time to break out the Scnapps.
The word “could” appeared seven times in the article. They did not document any effect other than a rise in local groundwater temperature. No indication of what real effect a local rise in groundwater temperature produces, just several dire “coulds”.
They obviously need more funding.
Funding issues or not, it looks like someone has gone out into the wilds – or urban car parks, which can also be scary – to collect data. That ranks as science.
Error bars – present, also.
Whether the heat in summer can be used to heat the city in winter seems uncertain.
And it looked, on a very cursory review, as if they considered ground water temperature at six locations only, and I didn’t see anything about confounding factors. Berlin, I believe, has a Metro – the U-Bahn, and I am unclear whether this accounts for the proximity, or otherwise of U-Bahn stations or tunnels. I may have missed it, though – it’s late here, and I only skimmed the paper.
Auto
were measurements made away from any underground facilities?
“Could” just as easily have been environmental heat garnered by the building structure being transferred into the ground.
“Using geothermal energy and heat pumps, the heat could be extracted from the ground and utilized.”
OMG. Please. No.
Satan, and all his drones, wept.
They propose using heat pumps to extract heat from the ground warmed by underground carparks housing ICE vehicles?
Next, if you’ve got serious amounts of geothermal energy under your apartment building you’ve got bigger problems to worry about than extracting heat from the carpark.
It reminds me of a punchline from the excellently entertaining movie “Once Bitten”, where a female vampire has to drink the blood of an 18 year-old male virgin in order to maintain her youth.
An older ‘expert’ in vampires quips “If he’s still a virgin at 18, then he’s got bigger problems than being chased by a vampire.”
(It was the 1980’s).
Ground heat pumps work because the temperature below 1metre is constant, not because it’s warm down there. That just means when it absorbs heat to expand the gas, the surrounding ground doesn’t get progressively colder and freeze.
Warmer geothermal energy would make no difference, since the heat pumps work by compressing gas giving out heat, the heat taken in when it expanded, and what heat that is is irrelevant to the ground temperature as long as above freezing.
Geothermal is a direct exchange of underground heat in a heat exchanger, not using compression of gases.
The ‘scientists’ are confusing heat energy with temperature, much the same way as the wind lobby confuses electrical energy – Watts, with electrical consumption – Watts per hour.
“Groundwater temperatures have been rising for decades as a result of global warming.”
Really? Maybe in urban areas but I bet very little in rural areas. Just guessing.
So what proportion of groundwater is located underneath car-parks? Miniscule, I’d have thought, although there would be exceptions like the Luton Airport car-park!
Check the local building codes.
To meet code, water lines have be buried at least a certain depth below the local “freeze line”.
(“Freeze Line” is the conservative depth at which a water line above that line might freeze and burst.)
Have been getting shallower?
Often, clear technological advances, allowing for significant advantages over existing systems, can’t make it into city building codes. Unions are often very resistant to change.
It’s a puzzle because below 1 metre the ground temperature is constant. How is it that the magic heat is being contained rather than dissipated into the rest of the ground under Germany?
Any uplift in temp must be transitory unless Germans keep their motors running whilst parked.
Given the effect of our well water on my teeth in the winter your guess is right on the money
Drinking groundwater that is running underneath a city big enough to have underground parking, EV or otherwise? Don’t drink that water, it will have a smorgasboard of pollutants. Instead steal some from your neigboring state. Fixed it.
Did you read that recently they have discovered lead contamination in ground water in lots of unexpected places where underground communications cables have been run by the phone company and in many cases abandoned and left there to rot.
UHI.
Here in Canada, underground car parks aren’t heated, and with the doors opening and closing, allowing cold air to enter during the winter, it is always cold in the car parks. In the condo building I live, I park on P4 level, and it is always damn cold down there. Even during the warm summer months, it never gets ‘hot’ down there.
Welcome aboard, Rudy. Sorry it took so long to moderate your comment.
Regards,
Bob
Just when you think there cannot be a more ridiculously alarming ‘warming’ study, along comes another yet more ridiculous. Alinsky rule #5 applies.
We have three groundwater wells on my Wisconsin dairy farm—one into the first limestone aquifer about 60 feet down (hand pump outside kitchen as house backup if power is lost, which often is for hours given remote rugged location), the other two into the second limestone aquifer about 120 feet down (electrically feeding automatic two barn’s richies/stock tanks plus house water systems). Any organisms (bacteria) in any of those wells would require that well to be shut in as contaminated. Forty plus years of dairying (think lots of cow poop on the watershed pastures and barnyards), and NO contamination in any. Class 1 dairy requires the barn wells be tested regularly (and the barns regularly whitewashed, and the milk also regularly tested). Of course, all three wells have double cemented outer/inner steel casings until the inner well borehole reaches below limestone basement rock, because everything in the soil above is almost certainly bacterial contaminated.
Near surface soil water bacteria are always present, generally a good thing (they help free soil mineral micronutrients for plant root uptake), and irrelevant to the real well groundwater world. Don’t know of any underground parking garage that goes down 60 feet. In Chicago, the deepest (just south of the BEAN) is 3 sub-Park surface stories, so only about 30-35 feet deep.
Talk about grasping at straws.
Shade a spot from sunshine and claim mankind warms up the spot it cooled…..
Something doesn’t sound right here.
Heat the LOCAL water table, briefly, OK. The water table is shallow. If you live near a stream, for example, the stream’s water will soak through porous surrounding soils to make the Water table. Rain will make, away from a stream, will also be part of a water table.
Dig down a few (maybe more than a few) feet and you’ll reach the water table.
Artesian groundwater can require 50 or more feet to reach to reach. It comes from a water table that has seeped below an layer of rock that separates it from the water table at a higher elevation.
A surface heat source will have little to no effect on it. The Earth itself will cool it.
Any effect on the water table itself just below the temporary source of heat will quickly pass.
Are they trying defend EV fires by saying they make heat pumps (temporarily) more effective?
I call garbage on this haha study.
Y: There’s a really huge assumption that The Heat is coming from the cars.
Because all the city’s drainage system will be underground and waste-water from every part of city life will be moving through it.
i.e. Water from homes (laundry, baths, showers, kitchens) also vast amounts from commercial properties.
Large buildings will be on concrete piles reinforced by steel rebar – conducting heat from their heating systems into the ground (water)
Those buildings will be conducting Urban Heat Island Heat into the ground.
When it rains, storm water will carry immnese amounts of heat into the ground and give it up to the ground (water)
Big electrical cables will be getting warm and putting more heat into the ground, even before the underground railway system does likewise
The input from cars, compared to that, will be next to zero.
These people are (no coulds woulds or maybes here, definitely are) = Myopic Guilt Ridden Puritanical Muppets.
There would also be some slight effect of these underground sewer and water lines actually “contributing” to the UHI. Should be calculable and even verifiable from soil frost depths in cities above say Latitude 40…
They are really scraping the bottom of the barrel to try to drum up fear anywhere possible. Does anyone really worry about this?
You can’t just pooh-pooh a problem away by ignoring it. This situation has to be addressed with concrete government action.
Underground car parks must be taxed.
We’d better watch you. You could turn to the dark side.
He was joking – but I’m sure you knew that when he said government action was required. That’s the best way to make a mountain out of an anthill.
“Groundwater temperatures have been rising for decades as a result of global warming.”
What? Where is this occurring? Is there any data to support this? Who is monitoring groundwater temperatures? This is preposterous!
IDEA! – Instead of using lithium in car batts, make it in to happy pills for “Progressives”.
I lived in a older Sacrament, CA suburb for quite a few years. I don’t know how far under the street the water pipes ran but the one to the building from the street was about 1 foot under the center of the driveway where there was an access plate to the water meter and the supply cutoff valve.
The building was a duplex. The water pipe came out of the ground right in front of the space, about 4 or 5 inches wide, between units (completely enclosed) and into that space to supply both sides of the building. That area was in shade from noon onward.
The cold water faucet in the bathroom, near the back of the building, as well as the one in the kitchen sink further forward, was generally too hot to wash my hands without letting the water run for some while during several months of every summer.
I never had an explanation but it certainly wasn’t any underground human source of heat unless it was some very secret government facility in a very unlikely location that only operated in the summer.
“Sacrament, CA”
So holy water in CA is hot?
I wonder why? 😎
(Sorry! Just a friendly jab at a typo.)
Probably the cold water line runs next to the hot water line inside the building and/or the building’s ambient heat is warming the cold water line.
When I first turn on the cold water in my house, the same type of thing happens.
(A side note. If you’re concerned about lead leaching into your water from the solder or lead service lines, especially first thing in the morning, run the water until if feel cooler than when you first turned it on before you drink it. IF you have copper lines with lead solder or a lead service line, it takes time for lead to leach into the water. Running the tap for a minute or so until it’s cooler should clear any water that was sitting there overnight.)
I just had to try get a handle on the magnitude if this travesty…
>The groundwater ain’t just gonna ‘sit there’ so do we assume it turns over at the rate of annual rainfall?
(It has to do that as an absolute bare minimum)
Lets call that 0.7metres per year for Berlin
Running a rough measure around Berlin says that its built-up area extends to 700 square kilometres
So 4.9×10¹⁴ cubic centimetres of water are sharing 6.5×10¹⁴ Joules of energy
At 4.2J/K/cc, I make that a temperature rise of 0.32Celsius
They actually reliably measured that in an underground carpark?
They really think it’s worth installing heatpumps to collect that?
Have they ever heard the name Sadi Carnot?
What went wrong here?
See why I said ‘bare minimum’
Consider the underground system..
Is 500MegaWatt going into that to move the trains along and all of it will be becoming ‘heat’
So *just* the underground train system is pushing 15.4 Petajoules into the ground every year – even before any hot sweaty Berliners scurry down there, adding another 200Watts per person for the duration of their train ride
And they think they found 0.65PJ
Sometimes I tease Peta for having too much sugar in his diet, and then he comes up with good stuff like these heat observations and calcs….
Instead of putting their heat pump intake next to an underground carpark in order to get that extra heat, they can go anywhere else they like and drill down three more inches to get the same amount of extra heat. And BTW when everyone has bought an EV or been executed for not doing so, those car engines won’t be delivering any heat to underground carparks anyway.
The Centralia Coal Seam fire has been burning through an abandoned deep mine in Pennsylvania’s Buck Mountain Coal Bed since May of 1962. Between 1962 and 1978, state and federal governments spent $3.3 million on measures to control the fire, which were mostly unsuccessful. By 1983, the United States Office of Surface Mining had determined that it would take an estimated $663 million to extinguish the fire completely. Due to concerns about bushfires and toxic fumes, US Congress approved an additional $42 million to relocate businesses and residences impacted by the fire a year later; 545 were moved between 1985 and 1991.
What a complete waste of time and money by ignoring the potential energy generation potential that this coal seam fire provides.
1) Care to provide actual evidence that ground water is warming? That includes the number and placement as well as full history of every “probe” being used to measure this so called warming.
2) Why do you assume that any alleged ground water warming must be because of the air is warming.
Have you plotted changes in ground water temperature vs changes in air temperature?
3) Why do you assume that any air temperature warming must be due to global warming? Have you checked to make sure it isn’t the result of UHI? Have you checked to see if there has been any changes in geothermal heat flow?
Look nobody has thought about this before. We needed a new angle. Let us have our moment in the limelight please!
Well, no shyte, morons. How much of our tax money was pissed away on this bullshit?
Fire up your fossil fuel and nuclear generators, build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators and build above ground parking.
Let’s spend multi million $$$s installing heat pumps to capture this heat then, after 2035 (or so, depending on your country) all vehicles will be electric and the heat in the car parks will no longer be there.
That won’t stop governments from spending money now for large losses later
Of course, the EV fires will be more prolific so there may be a long-term use for the heat pumps
There are “… 5,040 underground car parks in Berlin…”? Really, or is that the number of underground parking spaces?
That number includes bunkers.
Hmm. The ambient temperature that far underground is always warmer than ambient at the surface during the winter months and cooler during the summer months. However, since cold air sinks, I would think that the number of openings to the outside air would be a factor in what the air temperature would be with cars or no cars.
And that brings up a question. Should not they have gotten a base line by taking the temperature in at least a couple of parking garages in which there were no cars and had not been for a day or more to act as a control?
Just seems to me that there are far too unaccounted for variables to make this study worth much.
Here at my area of Indiana foundation footing must be poured a minimum of 40″ below the ground level to get below the frost line.
As an aside, a yard of concrete how costs a bit over $200.00. Three years ago it was just over $50.00.
“According to the team, geothermal energy and heat pumps could help utilise the excess heat in the ground”
Or, if this is really a problem, install a layer of insulation on the lowest level to keep the heat away from the ground water. I suspect insulation would be a lot cheaper than heat pumps. Also, absent the parking garages, there will be sunshine hitting the ground. Is this not more heat delivery than from the cars? I suspect so.
How much thermal energy is there in a couple of hundred kilogrammes of Bavarian V8 at 60C? It must be easier to extract that energy from the air near the car park ceiling rather than waiting for it to be absorbed by the concrete floor.
OMG, this is a testament to the axiom “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”. Are these people completely ignorant of realities? Have they ever spent time walking through underground car parks? (they are NEVER warm, and almost always cooler than ambient air temps at the surface)
Concrete has very substantial heat capacity and high density, and as such would not transmit heat to the underlying ground until it has absorbed significant quantities of heat.
Car parks must have substantial fresh air flow, to prevent plain asphyxiation or poisoning of persons walking through them from the car exhausts, and because engines would not start if O2 levels were too low.
This airflow is the primary removal element of the heat of IC cars parked. Radiative cooling is practically non existent, as the engine is located beneath numerous layers of metal, plastic and often even felt like insulation for sound. And in fact all German made cars have actual felt layers underneath their cars as shields against sound, and road debris. Hence there can be virtually no radiative cooling downward from the engine bay. All the heat released from a parked car goes into the air, which is whisked away by high turnover rates to keep pedestrians from dying.
Let’s do a reality check with some actual numbers:
average car engine is mostly aluminum, with some steel, and the composite heat capacity is 800 J/kg-C. It weighs average of 150 kg. It operates at 80C, and takes an hour to cool down to 20C.
So 150kg x 800J/kg-c x 60C delta = 7.2MJ of heat released. Virtually all of this goes into the air.
Let’s construct a 100 car underground park, which requires 708 m² of floor space, and standard depth of the floor concrete makes the floor roughly 1.7 million kg of concrete (concrete is 2400 kg/m³). Concrete has a heat capacity of 880 J/kg-C which yields 1,565 MJ per degree C for this floor mass.
Now suppose this theoretical car park has a turnover of 50 cars per hour, each releasing 7.2 MJ over an hour, for 360MJ released. If only 20% of the heat carried by the airflow through the carpark is transmitted to the floor concrete, this would heat the floor by 72/1565 = 0.046 degrees C.
50 cars per hour turnover is unreasonably high, more like 20 for a 100 space parking structure, so the concrete temperature rise from the car engines cooling to ambient is only 0.009 degrees C.
I call bull schist on this study from a practical, realistic perspective! (and because any underground car park I have ever been in is colder than above ground ambient air providing sensible confirmation that engine heat is not substantially heating the car park)
The hunt for topics for grad student theses is huge and most of what they can work on is bullshit..
The “publish or perish” mindset in academia is universal, so what they publish will have a high bullshit factor.
The belief of young academics is that their work needs to be useful to humanity, probably laudable, but causes them to willingly polish turds to get a paycheck.
Making something that is bullshit sound important and journal publishable is a full time topic in the grad lounges at universities. Second best is getting a media article to hype your “research” on the internet, with a vid on OohTube being top glory.
The belief of old academics is that they need to keep on “keepin’ on” until their pension kicks in.
You won’t get the truth out of them till they retire, and usually they will say their research is now outdated but they enjoyed shaping young minds.
So a self generating bullshit factory with not even a 1% “good stuff” component.
All these could combine to a massive couldn’t. Ignore all the heat that is lost to the ventilation and the access or upwards into the building structure; then ignore how diffuse this heating would be and almost impossible to collect efficiently. Ignore that the timings might not correspond to when the heat might be demanded. Just add up all the numbers and write an article.
It is like the sort of analysis of how a few minutes of total solar illumination is equivalent to decades of power for application x.
I am beginning to think Pol Pot had the right idea driving all the academics into the countryside to work the land.
At least they actually did some measurements and observations.
I am an engineer. While living and working in Alaska in the mid 1870s, I took a course in Arctic Engineering. The course included an analytical method for calculating heat loss from ground structures using flow nets. Ergo, I am highly skeptical if the proposition presented here. I’m originally from Missouri, so show me the analysis.