A hot, sweaty dance floor is helping heat and cool a Glasgow music venue by harvesting the heat from the dancers and storing it in rocks underground.

The system, called BodyHeat, is installed in several areas in the venue SWG3, allowing its gas boiler to be turned off permanently, saving money and cutting energy use.

"Anyone that's been to a venue and been into a busy venue and has experienced heat generated from the audience," Andrew Fleming-Brown, SWG3's Managing Director told Reuters.

Fleming-Brown was speaking as final preparations were made for an electro-dance music event with an expected audience of around a thousand.

"What is great about BodyHeat is our audience participates in the system," he said.

The thermal heating and cooling system capture the heat emitted from all of the venue’s visitors and stores it across 12 underground boreholes, before being used to heat or cool the venue later - whether it be the next day, the next month, or the next year.

Making music venues more eco-friendly

"So many nightclubs at the moment would use air conditioning units to capture that heat and take it away from the dance floor. But then it's just expelled into the air," David Walls, a geothermal geologist who helped TownRock Energy develop the system, told Reuters.

"When they've got something that needs heating, they just turn on the gas boiler. And that's the thing that we've intercepted here," he added.

Heat is transported in a series of pipes to heat pumps in the plant room, before going 200 m underground into the boreholes to be stored.

When the energy is ready to be used, it travels back to the heat pumps where it is upgraded to a suitable temperature for the three spaces where it is active, including Galvanizers, a 1,000-person former factory, a 1250-person capacity space, and the main foyer.

Source: euronews.com/next/2022/11/14/this-scottish-nightclub-is-storing-revellers-body-heat-to-harness-it-as-energy