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Comment by joshlk | Hacker News Reader

What do you do in the summer when the homes don’t want the heat?

That doesn't have to be a problem in practice.

The entire issue is that the earth surrounding the tubes is acting as a giant buffer. Enough heat has been dumped into it over the years that it has permanently warmed up. Draw heat from it during the winter to warm up homes, and it'll be able to absorb more heat from the tunnel air during the summer.

And because it's permanently warmed up, the long term consequence is the line becomes a health hazard and has to be closed for increasingly long periods.

When wet bulb > body temp people start getting heat stroke, which leads to fainting and potentially death - a bad look for a public transport system.

The likely remedy is to install gigantic refrigeration units in the ventilation shafts and pump in cold air. This will be hugely expensive to build and run.

But the alternative is a tube line that can't be used. So there may not be much choice.

It won't be zero so spreading it across enough people might already solve it. If that still leads to insufficient demand during the hottest weeks, idk, it's energy, surely there's something useful you can do? Store it for next week, pre-heat water for the nearest steam engine (e.g. gas power plants are steam engines running on methane, so if they have to heat the water by fewer degrees.. The problem will be finding a steam engine close to the heat source), supply it to an industrial process that needs temperatures above ambient (egg breeding for vaccine production? Idk), create electricity from the temperature differential between this system and the Thames water using the Peltier effect

I've surely got a too naïve view of economics but if the goal were to not waste resources then there will be things you can do before dumping it into the hot summer air

People still take hot showers and use hot water

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