People Powered Heating System in Sweden
Posted on February 28, 2008 by

How wild is this? In Stockholm, body heat will be harnessed to heat buildings.
Under an innovative new plan, the body heat from more than 250,000 people who pass through Stockholm Central Station each day will be captured and used to warm up water in a series of pipes, which will be pumped into a new office building nearby.
Apparently, the body heat can actually be a problem for the station, and instead of working on ventilation systems to get rid of the heat, they are harnessing it and putting it to good use.
The plan uses simple technology in a new way to transfer heat from where it isn’t wanted to where it is. I really hope this is something that catches on in other places.
Source

This reminds me of how dumb it seems to run the refrigerator in the winter while heating the air around it. And the opposite for the water heater in the summer.
Yeah — it’s along the lines of the whole powering a treadmill thing. How did our current energy systems evolve to this kind of wastefulness?