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The best way to heat homes IMHO is geothermal energy. It is clean and renewable. There is an element of electricity consumption, but far less than with direct electric heating.

There is a shift in Finland to geothermal, chosen for most new builds now, and district heating systems are exploring deep geothermal for heating whole towns and cities.



It's clean but renewable not so much in two ways: they are planning one here at a depth of 2.5 to 3km. They expect it to last 30 years before the underground has cooled to much to be of use. Regenerating that heat (i.e. spreading the other heat to this area) will take a few hundred years they expect. And secondly: there is a limited amount of heat available in the earth. It's a lot of heat, but there is no meaningful amount of new heat coming in so it's just as renewable as our current oil supply.


Interesting - do you have a source for that?

Makes sense though, and I think it depends on how much heat you extract - you could locally deplete the heat faster than it "regenerates" back to that area through natural radioactive decay and primordial heat loss


By geothermal, do you mean digging 30 meters into the ground for heat/cold? I've read that it doesn't work in densily populated areas where every system is very close to each other. Unless you have one installation per street.

We also have heat exchangers for warming your home but then you have a noisy box outside your house or on your balcony.


Densely populated areas in Finland are typically heated with district heating, rather than each house individually.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating

Right now the energy for district heating in Helsinki is a mix of fossil fuels and using waste sources of heat like data centre heat.

Renewable energy sources are currently being evaluated for this, with deep geothermal (up to several kilometres deep) being one source.

https://www.hel.fi/uutiset/en/helsinki/helen-investigates-po...


Geothermal is very geography dependent.

If you have it available, great! Otherwise, it is not viable.


Luckily in Finland it's very widely viable.

Article in Finnish- but the W/m geothermal potential illustration is in English

https://www.gtk.fi/geoenergian-ja-geotermisen-energian-poten...




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