SOME of you may have missed a news story last month that the Swedish government is to capture the body heat from the thousands of people who pass through the Stockholm Central Station each day to heat a new adjacent office building, hotel and shops.
The body heat from some 250,000 people using the station each day, some to catch trains and some simply visiting the many shops and stores inside, would be reclaimed from the ventilation system and pumped through pipes to the new building. Using this method, it is estimated that it would bring down heating costs by 20%.

On the face of it, many would see this as a good, environmentally sound idea, but is it? Where does our headlong rush to be more environmental than the next person/company/country start to seriously impinge on the rights of the individual?

I’m all for heat recovery systems, whether in your home or workplace, but I’m not sure whether I’m so comfortable with governments or large corporations making use of the general public in this way.

Personally, I have slight concerns that somebody might be actively making money from my body heat, which is produced by me as a result of burning calories produced from the increasingly expensive process of buying and eating food.

I may be playing devil’s advocate here but could this whole idea be the thin end of the wedge?

What is to stop the owners of Stockhom station delaying trains and herding increasing numbers of people into confined spaces just in order to maximise the amount of heat they can recover? Now I know some of you will say this already happens on UK railways, but that is down to greed and incompetence rather than a cynical exploitation of the individual.

If this idea was to catch on, though, there would be no need for the owners of any large public building to keep the general public cool and comfortable. Air conditioning could be dispensed with, companies could forget about any solar shading on windows and any ventilation could be targeted solely at harvesting heat from the general public. There are some areas where environmentalism and the race for energy efficiency could overstep the mark – and this may be it.

Some of you may not be aware that you can access more of this kind of inane drivel on the ACR News website (www.acr-news.com) – but there is also some content of real value, like our rolling daily news service which can be delivered direct to your desktop by way of our weekly newsletter, very kindly sponsored by Toshiba.

Go to www.acr-news.com/register.asp, fill in the form, and keep yourself up to date with the latest happening in the acr industry. No sweat, as they say.

Neil Everitt

Editor