[thermonot]

Is this actually efficient?

I've read before that this kind of low-temperature heat (low-grade heat) is not very useful. This is why district heating water is running at 90C+.

Can the mentioned heat pump use this low-grade heat to raise water to high-grade temperatures?

[thescriptkiddie]

Heat pumps become less efficient as the temperature differential across them increases, around 2% less efficient for every 1°C increase. If it's 5°C at street level and 19°C in the tunnels, that's a 14°C difference or around 28%.

[Scoundreller]

Isn’t it more efficient to extract heat from a 19C environment vs a 5C environment for domestic heating?

[gingabriska]

This seems unintuitive. Why does it happen? I'd assume, it's faster to move heat from one source at very high temperature Vs one source at very low temperature.

[scarejunba]

I think he's a bit mixed up. That rule of thumb is for when you're pumping from cold area to warm area, which is what you usually do. For instance from outside (10 degrees C air) to inside (21 degrees C air). Then you can see how the performance would drop as the differential changes.

A heat pump should perform really well when the place it's pumping from is high temperature like this. Pumping from 19 degrees C to a house that's 21 degrees C is going to be great.

Obviously things will be much less efficient if the heat pump were being used to warm the Underground from outside air (5 degrees C) but no one's going to do that! The Underground air is going to go into the home (which is at 21 degrees C). The street air isn't in the picture at all.