Statistical Investigation of Climate Change Effects on the Utilization of the Sediment Heat Energy

Nebiyu Girgibo,Xiaoshu Lü,Anne Mäkiranta,Erkki Hiltunen

doi:10.3390/en15020435

Nebiyu Girgibo, Xiaoshu Lü + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/en15020435

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Abstract

Suvilahti, a suburb of the city of Vaasa in western Finland, was the first area to use seabed sediment heat as the main source of heating for a high number of houses. Moreover, in the same area, a unique land uplift effect is ongoing. The aim of this paper is to solve the challenges and find opportunities caused by global warming by utilizing seabed sediment energy as a renewable heat source. Measurement data of water and air temperature were analyzed, and correlations were established for the sediment temperature data using Statistical Analysis System (SAS) Enterprise Guide 7.1. software. The analysis and provisional forecast based on the autoregression integrated moving average (ARIMA) model revealed that air and water temperatures show incremental increases through time, and that sediment temperature has positive correlations with water temperature with a 2-month lag. Therefore, sediment heat energy is also expected to increase in the future. Factor analysis validations show that the data have a normal cluster and no particular outliers. This study concludes that sediment heat energy can be considered in prominent renewable production, transforming climate change into a useful solution, at least in summertime.

Highlights

Sediment energy is renewable energy because the thermal energy of the sediment layer mainly originates from the Sun
The difference between the results shown in the above two figures can be explained by the correlations between August and September 2013 sediment temperatures in the two locations
Our conclusion, based on a summary of statistics, is that the pattern was site-specific and depended on installation depth. This was confirmed during dependency analysis

Summary

Introduction

Sediment energy is renewable energy because the thermal energy of the sediment layer mainly originates from the Sun (with seasonal storage and loss). A minor portion is from the Earth’s own geothermal energy. The flux in solar energy is from four to five orders of magnitude larger than the flux in geothermal heat on a normal land surface [1,2,3]. The combination of geothermal energy and solar energy as an energy source is called geoenergy [4]. Sediment heat is usually collected by the pipes that are horizontally installed into the sediment layer, and circulating heat-extracting liquid in the pipes. The temperature profile of the sediment is collected using the Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) method [5,6]. Reimers et al [9] investigated a different way of harvesting energy from Marchine sediment–water interface

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