Three types of people

This article was first published in Albuquerque's Local IQ Magazine

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There are types of people who should run, not walk, to their nearest renewable energy installer.

You have a pool. One of the downsides to solar thermal (creating heat and hot water directly from the sun) is that you need rather large storage tanks -- for two reasons. First, unlike solar electric, your hot water usage peaks and falls -- you get up in the morning, take a shower, fill and start the dishwasher and then run a load of clothes. Then while you are at work, you need very little hot water at all. This means that the system has to be sized for peak use, so that in most cases your hot water is made by the Sun, rather than the backup system. Secondly, the inside of your storage tank is like a layer cake -- hot water at the top, warm water in the middle and cold water at the bottom. Using a single tank to hold these layers prevent you from needing several different holding tanks. To prevent cold water and hot water from mixing into a unpleasant lukewarm morning shower, these storage tanks are significantly larger than the standard water heater, and are one of the major costs for installing solar thermal system. However, if you already have a pool, you can actually use your swimming pool as a heat-storage unit. Not only will this eliminate some costs, but you will gain pool heating for free In addition some of your swimming pools costs may become tax deductible (US) now that it is part of a renewable energy system.
 
You live near a water source.
If your house is in the farmland or Bosque near the Rio Grande and you have a large, lightly-landscaped yard you are an ideal candidate for ground-coupled geothermal. You don't need to live on a volcano for this to work. Currently in the summer you are battling 110F degree weather, and you pull that hot air from outside, cool it, and push it through the house. However, eight feet under the house there is a lovely cool temperature of 55F degrees. During the winter you use 28F degree air, force it through a heater, then use it to heat your house, but eight feet under the house the temperature is still 55F degrees. Rather than fight the seasonal air temperature, you can use the constant year-round temperature of the ground to pre-heat or pre-cool. Because dry sandy soil is not very good at conducting heat, some places in New Mexico require more digging than ground-coupled geothermal in the Midwest. However, near the river, the thermal conductivity of the soil is especially high. If you have a well, it may be possible to run the thermal coupling inside the well, without any trenching at all. Ground coupled geothermal is usually installed with a heat pump – together this system becomes a geothermal heat pump. A weird freak of state politics makes geothermal heat pumps an excellent investment in New Mexico. Most renewable energy systems, including geothermal, get a thirty percent tax break from the Federal government. Geothermal initially got shorted in Santa Fe – it wasn't included in bill that provided the ten percent state tax break. The issue was brought up in a later year and geothermal wound up with a thirty percent tax break, so depending on your tax situation, your system may be covered up to sixty percent through tax credits. Geothermal heat pumps do use small amounts of electricity – if you want the system to be 100% renewable you can add a small solar photovoltaic collector -- then you have a solar-geothermal system.  

You heat with electric, rather than natural gas. The last, and largest, group of New Mexican's who should install renewable energy immediately, are those who use electricity to heat their house and make hot water. Heating with electricity can cost up to three times what it costs to heat with natural gas. The payback period for installing a solar thermal system may be as short as two years, given the high prices you are already paying on your electric bill. Twelve percent of New Mexicans use electricity for heating. I suspect that many more of us are inching towards electric heat without thinking about it. If you live in a older house or one with remodeled spaces, you may find that your old heater doesn't adequately heat the far reaches and that you are plugging in electric space heaters in the back bedroom or the room that used to be the garage.


This article by Kristy Dyer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may reprint it for free, as-is.