Sustainable heating solutions
UC’s newer buildings, the Haere-roa UCSA student building, and student accommodation facility Tupuānuku, are heated with renewable energy from ground source heat pumps (GSHP). This technology is also used in some public buildings in Ōtautahi Christchurch such as Tūranga, the city library.
A further five buildings on Ilam campus, the Science Precinct - Beatrice Tinsley, Julius Von Haast, Ernest Rutherford, Pūtaiao Koiora – and the Central Lecture Theatres have now been converted to GSHP. Four new bores have been drilled (two for extracting water at approx. 150m and two for reinjection returning water at approx. 60m), and a plant room has been built next to the Ernest Rutherford Building, along with new landscaping.
What is Ground Source Heat Pump technology?
GSHP technology harnesses the Earth's latent thermal energy. It is a heating/cooling system for buildings that uses a type of heat pump to transfer heat to or from the ground or ground water, taking advantage of the relative constancy of temperatures of the Earth through the seasons.
A commonly-used technique in Christchurch is to draw water from an aquifer. A heat pump then takes the heat gathered from a deep aquifer and uses energy to increase and extract that heat so that it can heat buildings.
Water from the aquifer isn’t polluted or permanently removed – only its warmth is used, and the cooled water is returned to a shallower aquifer.
