The heat of the hips takes on its full meaning in Glasgow, where a performance hall inaugurates a renewable heating system “from the heat of the bodies on her dance floor”reports the BBC.
The body heat of the dancers is directly captured and stored “in boreholes” connected to a heat pump that diffuses and modulates the heat throughout the SWG3 building “at the right temperature”, explains the British public media. The owners of the Scottish performance hall believe that this system should enable them to “completely disconnect gas boilers from the venue, thereby reducing CO emissions2 about 70 tons per year”.
A dancing body can give off 600 watts
According to David Townsend, founder of the geo-energy company behind the process, called BodyHeat (“body heat”), someone dancing “on a medium beat, like the Rolling Stones or something like that, can generate 250 watts”. Most “with a master DJ, slamming the bass lines and literally jumping everyone, you can release 500 to 600 watts of heat energy”.
Announced during COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021, the device took three years to finalize and cost 600,000 pounds. The installation of conventional heating would certainly have cost 10% of this sum, recognizes Andrew Fleming-Brown, the director of SWG3. But he hopes for a return on investment “in five years” through savings on electricity bills.
Zero emissions
Jon Gluyas, geo-energy researcher at the University of Durham in England, considers that this thermal floor heating, if it requires “a lot of energy” to maintain the temperature of the water in the pipes, restores it “rather slowly”. It is therefore “a great way to store energy”, he said. This technique “zero carbon emissions” is “a phenomenal way to really reduce our energy demand”, he explains.