Manhattan Transfer: Geothermal Technology in the City
(Page 2 of 4)
January/February 2003
By Robyn Griggs Lawrence
ICF blocks are lightweight and waterproof, which meant John’s crew could work right through a snowy winter. Once concrete is poured into the forms, they become a solid, monolithic mass. “We live in a bomb shelter here,” says John—and that proved to be important in September 2001, as the house is blocks from the World Trade Center site. The towers’ collapse measured 3.0 on the Richter scale in lower Manhattan, but John and his family didn’t feel a thing.
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In the front of the building, a facade of recycled steel—chosen to reflect the historic cast iron buildings of the lower Manhattan neighborhood—was placed over the ICF superstructure. The twenty-five-foot by sixty-two-foot facade, fabricated in a Newark, New Jersey, bridge factory, weighs nineteen tons and had to be delivered in twenty-five-foot chunks, then welded together on the site and lifted into place in one piece. “It was like a barn-raising,” John says, remembering all the neighbors who turned out to watch the spectacle.
Tapping into the eEarth
Perhaps the home’s most astonishing feature is the way it’s heated and cooled: through a geothermal heat pump, a system of underground pipes that uses the earth as a heat sink in the summer and a heat source in the winter. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has declared geothermal the most energy efficient, environmentally clean, and cost-effective space conditioning system available. For John, it just made good sense.
“We’d made it over the financial hurdle of buying a house,” he says. “But we couldn’t pull it off if the house were expensive to operate. We had to layer in the potential energy costs.”
Geothermal systems—which John considers one of the only cost-effective energy choices for smaller buildings in a dense urban area—save energy (which sells for nineteen cents per kilowatt in New York) by moving hot and cold rather than creating it, as traditional heating and cooling systems do. In New York, the earth’s internal temperature remains at a relatively constant fifty-two degrees. So in winter, pipes full of liquid reach deep underground to pull heat up via heat pumps into the building; the heat is then distributed through a radiant floor system and fan-coil units. In summer, heat from the building is then discharged via heat pumps back into the cooler ground.
In addition, a desuperheater transfers the excess heat from the heat pump’s compressor into the hot water tank. In summer, hot water is free; in winter, water heating costs are cut nearly in half.
John first discovered geothermal while working on a high-end penthouse for a client. He didn’t want to install an air conditioner because it was big and noisy, and accommodating it would mean reducing the penthouse’s size. Geothermal equipment can be kept in a basement—relatively unusable space. “But at the last minute, the developer said, ‘I’m a smart New York developer, and no one’s ever done this before. I’m not doing it. I’m not going to be the first,’” John says. And he realized that if he wanted to tinker with this technology, he’d have to try it on his own home first.