On the importance of a coordinated site characterization for the sustainable intensive thermal use of the shallow subsurface in urban areas: a case study

Monitoring the impact of intensive shallow geothermal energy use on groundwater temperatures in a residential neighborhood

“…Additional information on the test site is available upon request from the authors. All in all, results highlight the need for a coordinated geothermal development (e.g., Vienken et al 2015), consideration of the use of shallow geothermal energy already in the early phase of urban planning and development (e.g., Schelenz et al 2017), and management concepts (e.g., Alcaraz et al 2016;Epting et al 2017) to bring forward the ecological and economic sustainable intensive thermal use of the shallow subsurface.…”

“…A model-based prediction of induced groundwater temperatures changes can further provide valuable information in these cases when the choice of well locations is restricted by property rights and availability of utility and unexploded ordnance clearances. However, model extent in combination with limited data availability causes yet high uncertainty in such model-based predictions (e.g., Schelenz et al 2017). Key data for this case study are provided as additional download file for this article to foster future work in this area.…”

“…The constant advancement of simulation tools and computational power allow meanwhile investigations on various scales (Boockmeyer and Bauer 2016;Hein et al 2016). However, the lack of monitoring data (heat pump operation and groundwater temperature data) for model parametrization and calibration as well as the lack of reliable exploration data with resulting oversimplification of the geological and hydrogeological regime lead to resulting simulation uncertainties in practice (e.g., Schelenz et al 2017;Hermans et al 2018)-making exploration and actual groundwater temperature monitoring indispensable.…”

Factors Influencing the Thermal Efficiency of Horizontal Ground Heat Exchangers

“…In detail, shallow geothermal energy is a reliable thermal energy source used mainly for indirect heating and cooling of residential, industrial or commercial buildings and greenhouse farming [5][6][7]. It involves the exploitation of low temperature geothermal resources, as soil and groundwater (temperature range 5-30 • C), abundant around the world and available at relative small depths (on average around 100-150 m depth), by means of ground source heat pumps (GSHPs) [8,9]. This technology consists of three main sections: (i) the Earth connection, represented by heat exchangers, responsible for extracting (injecting) heat from (into) the ground; (ii) the geothermal heat pump, able to transfer heat between the ground and the building; (iii) the heat distribution system, that distributes the heat in the building [10].…”

Subsurface energy storage: geological storage of renewable energy—capacities, induced effects and implications

“…Assessing the opportunities and risks of subsurface use requires structural information on subsurface formations in terms of their occurrence and prevalence as well as their properties and induced effects regarding the use as potential storage sites. Here the papers by Dethlefsen et al (2016Dethlefsen et al ( , 2017 Schelenz et al (2017) as well as Wang and Bauer (2016), and applications to geomechanical effects during cavern storage by Khaledi et al (2016) and monitoring aspects Köhn et al (2016). Dimensioning and effects of porous formation gas storage are considered in Feldmann et al (2016) and Pfeiffer et al (2016a), who also test adequate monitoring methods in a virtual setting.…”