Paris Metro Riders Heating Apartment Building

I wrote last week on a cool pilot project in Philadelphia in which the kinetic energy created from subway trains braking will be captured and either reused in accelerating trains, stored for later, or sold back to the electricity grid. While I think that project is super cool, this one maybe be even cooler.

A housing project in Paris (probably my favorite city in the world) is going to start getting its heating (well, some of it) from the warm bodies waiting around in the Metro station nearby and from the heat generated by trains running back and forth along the tracks.

This experimental project is expected to heat about 17 apartments and cut the building’s carbon emissions by about 33%.

While the Philly project mentioned at the top of this piece will be expanded if it goes well, this one actually won’t, or there are no plans for it to be.

“This particular project is one of opportunity – a stairwell that happens to connect the building to the Metro is serving as a conduit for the heat – and creating a means to pipe heat from other Metro stations to surrounding buildings is too expensive to be feasible,” Clay Dillow of Popsci writes.

Nonetheless, it seems that there is a lot of potential here and other subway systems, and buildings near subway stations, should look into such possibilities.

I’m personally quite surprised at how much heat is expected to be captured and transferred to the building. Next time I’m in Paris, I’ll have to check this building out!

Photo Credit:  baswallet via flickr