Abstract Summary
The impact of the presence of heated basements near a field of 88 borehole ground heat exchangers is explored, for borehole depths of 50 m and 100 m, in terms of the GHEs performance over a 50 years operating period. The basements act to increase the ground temperature and average fluid temperature (in heating mode), raising the COP, albeit by only a small amount (by 0.05 for 100 m, and 0.08 for 50 m GHEs). While heated basement presence does not significantly improve GHE performance, the results suggest that capital cost savings could be achieved by having fewer boreholes.
