Re Home energy.
I would love to see all homes producing their own power. Wind and solar come to mind, but in the UK I believe it takes a very big investment in both to get it up and running and something like 25 years for it to pay for it's self (might be less now with the price increases) which is about the life expectancy of the hardware, so there's not much incentive. I'm not sure of the correct terminology, but I would have thought that extracting natural heat from a very deep bore hole, via a circulating water system, should be a pretty cheap and cost effective idea, that could be low maintenance and long lived. I've seen pipes laid 2-3 feet below the surface over a large area but I would have thought a deep bore hole, into which a none corrosive coil could be lowered, would be easier, more efficient and less intrusive.
I have an off grid PV home that I designed and in my earlier years designed residential and small commercial active and passive thermal solar heating systems, as well as ground source heat pump systems, some with solar boost to the line temp. We did this with large horizontal loops buried 5-6 feet down, but usually there wasn't room for this, so drilled and dropped 100ft deep loops in parallel on a manifold to even the flow and reduce resistance.
I cannot tell if this thread is about thermal or electric energy or both.
The challenge you have with extracting heat from a loop or bore is that while the earth is a huge thermal flywheel, the temperature difference between the earth and the liquid circulating in the loop needs to be large enough or the liquid needs to stay in the loop long enough to transfer significant numbers of BTUs to the water in the pipe. The other huge problem is that the heat in the earth is available at a lower temperature than is required for human comfort, so must be concentrated and the temperature raised to achieve the output temps required for comfort. The heat transfer to the conditioned space or water, drops the refrigerant temp significantly low enough chill the loop water in the process. This creates a workable temperature differential to promote heat transfer in the earth loop. As I said before, you can add thermal solar to the return from the earth loop to boost temps too, but this only raises the temp about 5 degrees F, so mostly improves the efficiency of the system when solar is available rather than replace the refrigeration system. These systems (minus the solar) are now used in many institutional settings and in residences in areas that need significant heating and cooling.
Refrigeration systems (despite the efficiencies of this type of setup) require lots of electricity in excess of most off grid PV systems, so this technology has only been used on the grid as far as I know.
If you somehow could tap geothermal sources, this gets a lot easier.
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