If I ever get to build a house from scratch and can afford what I want I’ll incorporate both of those technologies and others as well into it. Once I looked for the heck of it at a housing development where every house sat on between an 1.5 and 2+ acres. It was a requirement for every home to use a geothermal heat pump system.

The other, and similar, is to allow the thermal mass of the earth to warm or cool the air entering a house so it needs less heating and cooling. This is accomplished by drawing outside air down to foundation level before bringing it into the house. Here’s an example.

An excellent case in point is our own utility, Xcel. Their Wind Source program reached an important and critical tipping point last year. Because of the increasing cost of carbon based fuels, wind energy actually became less expensive than coal and natural gas, for the production of electricity. Because of this, those who had signed up for the program, including myself (100%), were receiving a discount on electricity, rather than a surcharge. This generated some highly positive publicity for Xcel, and resulted in a waiting list of companies and individuals wanting to sign up for the program. Unfortunately, but perfectly consistent for the utility industry, Xcel successfully petitioned our Public Utilities Commission to artificially inflate the cost of wind power, because “our customers expect to pay more for alternative energy.”

A highly profitable utility that could have become an environmental hero, chose instead to continue its decades-long pursuit of environmental villainy. Of course, our Public Utilities Commission shares the blame, but as with so much else in government today, that regulatory body has been stacked with industry friendly allies, rather than with knowledgeable experts working for the public good.

Once again, this underscores the vital need for government regulation to assure that the public interest is the highest priority of our government, and that we are applying incentives to move us in the direction we need to go and which the public widely supports. In this case, actual market forces were providing the most powerful incentive in many years, to decrease our reliance on carbon based fuels, and our emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. And once again the all too cozy relationship between industry and government crushed this incentive. Meanwhile,Xcel built a massive coal-fired power plant, at their rate payers expense, which they now admit they do not need to provide power for Colorado. As a result, Colorado ratepayers are defrauded, while the utility gets a free power plant from which to sell power to those in other states who did not finance the building or operation of the power plant.

Good for you, Jason!
Congratulations on making an excellent decision.