Cheap-GSHPs project: a valuable experience in shallow geothermal systems for heating and cooling in buildings

For the past year I have had the opportunity to work as a project coordinator of the Cheap-GSHPs project, co-funded under the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union. The acronym stands for Cheap and Efficient Application of Reliable Ground Source Heat Exchangers and Pumps, clearly revealing what the project aims to accomplish by 2019.

The project’s consortium includes research centers and universities, material suppliers, constructors of drilling machines and heat pumps, engineering companies and installers. All of the consortium partners are specialized in specific parts of the creation of low enthalpy geothermal systems.

Cheap-GSHPs offers a particularly valuable experience for the energy efficiency in the buildings sector, as it develops many innovative technologies and tests them at several demonstration sites in different European climate zones that include both historical and modern buildings. 

Innovative technologies

First of all, the project targets substantial reductions of the total cost of ownership next to increased safety and awareness of shallow geothermal systems for heating and cooling in buildings. For this purpose, innovations in coaxial and helicoidal type Ground Source Heat Exchanger (GSHE) designs are simulated, field tested and deployed in demonstration cases. These innovations are combined with developments in drilling machine components and installation technologies. All these innovations are progressing well. In addition, heat pumps with increased efficiencies at higher temperatures are being designed to reduce overall costs in the building refurbishment market by avoiding the need to change all the heating terminals.

Furthermore, a holistic optimization and design methodology, integrating several building blocks all along the engineering chain, is being built to create a decision support tool (DSS) and lower the threshold of implementation of this technology. The geological, regulatory and safety aspects in the EU are addressed with particular focus on the countries where demonstration cases are foreseen. Preparatory work is ongoing and site visits have been made in view of the six real and ten virtual demonstration cases, including historical buildings.

Cheap-GSHPs aims at reducing the installation costs of the GSHE’s up to 25-30% and contributing to reducing the impact on the environment with a reduction of CO2 emissions of 1.800 T/y. Cheap-GSHPs focuses on improving the yield and reducing the cost of two types of vertical BHE’s by developing drilling machines and improving the BHE design. The two types of GSHE’s are respectively the coaxial steel BHE and the heat basket type GSHE. The first type is installed using either the ‘vibrasond’ or the ‘easy drill‘ technique. The vibrasond technique is patented in Italy and has been installed several times in Northern Italy over the last 5 years. In Belgium the technology has been awarded an innovation prize and more than 18000 m of BHE’s were installed in the period 2011 – 2015. This fairly new technology, cost competitive with the conventional single and double U BHEs, still has a lot of potential. This potential will be developed in this project by realizing a purpose built drilling machine, improving and combining both before mentioned techniques on one machine basis. Several improvements to the coaxial BHE will be made as well.

To summarise, the project aims at building innovative drilling machines, substantially improving GSHEs in several of its aspects and expanding the field of applications. In addition, an end-to-end approach will be developed to select and deliver from a cost and safety perspective the optimum system including heat pumps and plant configurations, adding the integration of other synergy creating Renewable Energy Systems.

Case studies

The project case studies are essential for Cheap-GSHPs, as they will highly contribute to validate the new technologies at real scale. On the other hand, the selected cities and small districts will become good practice examples to promote the overall use of Cheap-GSHPs technologies all over Europe and beyond.

Following different criteria with regards to climate, location and historic periods, we have selected six real and ten virtual demonstration cases covering both historical and civil buildings. The real demo case studies will be performed in Ireland, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Croatia and Greece, while the virtual demo site buildings are located in Ireland, Italy, Bosnia, Spain, Romania, Switzerland, Serbia and Sarajevo.

In the real demo case studies the innovations will be actually installed, operated and confronted with conventional technologies. The virtual case studies will allow us to simulate and evaluate the performance of the innovative solutions in other climate zones and different ground conditions, providing us with a larger scenario of applicability and efficiency of the new technologies and systems. All these virtual case studies will also facilitate the comparison in terms of economic feasibility.

What I find particularly interesting and valuable is the testing of the technologies in notable cultural-historical buildings in cooperation with UNESCO. The demonstration sites will be a concrete proof of the ability to integrate these technologies in cultural sites and will highlight how the innovative shallow geothermal heat exchangers applications may successfully overpass conservational constraints and barriers to geothermal power application in cultural sites.

You can find further information on the case studies in the project brochure here.

Where we are now

The results achieved since the project started in June 2015 demonstrate that it is progressing as planned and it gradually fulfils the requirements of the key performance indicators in terms of replication, social-economic impact, environmental impact, market transformation and policy adaptation. 

If you would like to know more about the Cheap-GSHPs project and the solutions we are working on, you can visit our website and get in touch!