How to heat your home for free

[Aurora]

Daily Wail - 21/03/11

Britain’s latest energy revolution doesn’t look like much. Twenty-four acres of windswept, gravelly wasteland, a handful of muddy portable buildings, and a small drilling rig rocking gently in the bright sunshine.

But this workaday scene belies the fact that here, a mile, maybe two, under Newcastle upon Tyne lies what some experts believe is the solution to our energy crisis. Because deep in the Earth’s crust, thousands of feet under the city, lurk tens of cubic miles of scaldingly hot rocks. And if all goes well, the people and businesses of Newcastle will, within a couple of years, receive their heating and hot water almost gratis, and carbon-free, courtesy of this ancient heat source.

It is easy to be sceptical. Free energy deep in the Earth’s crust sounds too good to be true. People have been talking about ‘geothermal energy’ since I was a child. In the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, the government investigated several potential sites, but this came to nothing because of the initial expense, and interest dwindled as fossil fuel prices fell.

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