Could We Recycle Excess Subway Heat?

Heating homes and other human hangouts requires a huge carbon footprint -- but meanwhile, we're wasting heat every day (and sweating) in systems like subways. Learn how one project hopes to use that excess heat for the greater good in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogel bomb here. With a ridership of more than
one billion passengers per year, the London Underground, better known
as the Tube, varies an impressive number of residents and
tourists across the city. It opened its first line in
eighteen sixty three as the Metropolitan Railway, which provided locomotive

(00:24):
trains that carried nine point five million passengers. In eighteen nine,
the line began running electric cars, making it the first
subway or metro system in the world. But it's also
impressively hot due to those very old, deep clay tunnels
containing few ventilation shafts, which lock in excess heat from
the metro system and make many a Londoner sweat on

(00:45):
their daily commute. The hottest stations without air conditioning routinely
get to eighty six degrees fahrenheit that's thirty degrees celsius
or more, and rising temperatures due to global warming don't help.
But one enterprising collaboration between the London Borough, Islington and Ramble,
a consulting company that works on many issues including energy
and urban design, will harness some of that excess subway

(01:07):
heat for the benefit of Londoners, with a completion date
for the project as early as late twenty nineteen. Ramble
has been commissioned by the Islington Council to quote deliver
a district wide heating network to provide cheaper and greener
heat to one thousand, three hundred and fifty homes plus
community buildings in North London. According to their press release

(01:28):
of those homes, the Islington Council and Ramble have already
brought cheap green energy to more than eight hundred through
the bun Hill Heat and Power Network, but the Islington
Council wanted to do more in order to reach their
goal of providing efficient and sustainable heat to the remaining homes.
So Ramble proposed extracting wasted heat for the London Underground's

(01:48):
northern line, specifically through a ventilation shaft connected to an
abandoned tube station, to serve as an innovative, low carbon
heat source for five hundred homes in North London. The
plan is to use heat pumps to harness that excess
heat of the London Underground. According to the press release,
Ramble says that these heat pumps that recycle industrial heat
will prove to be a far more efficient and cheaper

(02:11):
use of carbon than gas powered energy sources, which is
a great win for the residents of North London whose
homes will be fueled by the waste energy from the
Northern Line. Riders on the Northern Line will sigh in
relief at cooler tunnels on their commute, and all Londoners
will reap the benefits of reduced air pollution and lower
carbon emissions. Could this innovative model be applied to other

(02:31):
cities with notoriously hot subway systems and more high density housing.
With the concerns of climate change looming, leaders all around
the world are hoping to decarbonize or remove carbon from
the global economy in order to move toward a carbon
neutral future by twenty fifty. Plans like the one in
Islington could be the first step in getting there. Today's

(02:56):
episode was written by Terry er Lagatta and produced by
Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more in this and lots
of other hot topics, visit our home planet how stuff
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