by jbs082310 g3 — August 25, 2010—IKEA, the Swedish home furnishings retailer, has teamed with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to showcase and study the advantages of a geothermal heating system currently under construction in Centennial, Colorado.
It will be the first IKEA store in the United States to be built with geothermal heating and cooling, said Douglas Wolfe, IKEA project construction manager for the store, which is expected to open south of Denver in the fall of 2011. The 415,000-square-foot, two-level store will be atop two stories of parking.
Workers are drilling 130 holes directly below the location of the future parking garage. Each 5 1/2-inch diameter hole is 500 feet deep, where the temperature remains about 55 degrees year-round. Liquid will be run down pipes in one hole and up another, either heating or cooling the liquid as necessary.
The IKEA/NREL project could be the benchmark for a credible standard for geothermal installation in large-scale retail stores nationwide, says NREL. NREL’s database of live data on the performance of the systems will be open to researchers around the world to use for their models.
