Displacing conventional renewable energy technologies for new buildings, the breakthrough development of a practical and low cost form of inter-seasonal heat storage, the Earth Energy Bank (EEB), has made it easy to store summer-time heat in the earth below buildings for use the following winter.
This innovation is combined with two other renewable technologies to form an integrated system that opens the door to cost effective zero carbon buildings. A hybrid solar array, also known as PV-Thermal or PV-T, enables much more solar energy to be collected than conventional PV or thermal arrays. Its panels deliver four times the energy per sq m than PV by extracting both heat and electricity from the same panel. In winter, the stored heat is extracted from the EEB using a ground source heat pump.