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Commercial Geothermal heat pump systems (Part One): consider their many attributes, which are well suited to address concerns about a building's operational cost and environmental impact.

Article Excerpt
As 2009 unfolds, there are many concerns about how the HVAC industry, especially the portion associated with new construction, will fare in the months (years?) ahead. America appears to have reached a point where a retracting economy and unstable energy prices have driven building owners to reexamine priorities.

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The frills and energy-related complacency that were more easily absorbed in construction budgets only a few years ago are giving way to pragmatic choices about the efficacy of the building, its appeal to future tenants, its long-term impact on the environment, and its cost of operation.

One technology benefiting from this reexamination of priorities is geothermal heat pump systems. Although certainly not new in the HVAC industry, these systems offer a set of attributes that makes them well suited to the current situation:

1. They can be quickly switched from heating to cooling or vice versa as the needs of the zone change.

2. In commercial buildings, they take advantage of load diversity (e.g., a common situation in commercial buildings in which there are simultaneous demands for heat and cooling in different zones).

3. Their efficiency, in well-matched applications, lets them deliver heat at a unit cost that's significantly lower than provided by other fuel options.

4. They harvest the majority of their heating energy from "phase delayed solar energy" (e.g., solar heat stored in the earth for several months), and, thus, can legitimately be classified as a renewable energy system. Congress recently made this "official" through wording in the economic stimulus legislation.

5. They are complementary to electrical energy produced by clean-energy sources such as photovoltaic systems, wind power and hydropower.

6. Since they only require electricity as a "fuel," they lend themselves...

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