Most of us experience warm summers and cold winters and we are aware of the enormous amounts of energy available from the sun during the summer. If we could store some of that energy it could help us heat our homes through the winter..

Storing energy is not difficult. You just let the sun and the rain help trees grow for thirty years and cut down the tree for fuel. It is a Reusable energy supply but it takes a lot of time. What we need is an energy source that can capture the solar energy during the summer and store it for a few months to be used during the winter.

If we were to begin a process of building our homes and offices with the intention of storing energy from the sun we could make a huge difference to our energy costs and the energy supplies we import and release far less pollutants into the atmosphere.

We are getting better at capturing solar energy through photovoltaic solar panels which generate electricity from the light of the sun and solar heating panels which capture the heat of the sun and are usually used to heat our hot water.

The efficiency of both types of panels continues to improve and as the price of energy has increased over the years both types of solar energy recovery panels make more financial sense. We still use a lot of energy and these panels give us energy in the summer but our greatest need for energy is during the cold winter months.

One idea that would enable us to store the summer solar energy is to build our homes and industrial buildings with a basement, or sub-basement, which would be very well insulated and filled with concrete, rock or even water.

Pipes would be run through the storage material and throughout the summer months would be gently heating this material and when winter arrives we would have a massive store of heat energy to be used to supplement our normal heating requirements. The same pipework what was used to heat the store material would now be used to pump that heat out and around the home.

We would need to ensure our homes were well insulated to make the most of this residual heat store and the cost of this extra basement would add to the cost of new buildings but once in place the system would continue to work year after year, supplying free heating every winter.

We would need an array of solar heating panels but they could be included on a south facing wall when the property was built. The panels could be relatively low efficiency in most cases as they will be collecting the solar energy over several months and there would be a limit to how much energy could be stored in the energy storing basement area.

It is a fairly low tech solution to the problem of storing energy for later use and should be very cost effective since it would last the life of the building. This could be one way we can make better use of solar energy and heat our homes more cheaply with fewer demands on our planets limited and dwindling energy supplies.

Storing heat in the basement can warm the whole house for some time but a perfect partner for a system like this would be a geothermal heat pump system installed to use the heat from the surrounding ground as an additional heat source or as a way of heating the heat storage area.

If this were combined with a way of generating energy from windpower or producing electricity from solar panels you would have a home that would be a big step towards self sufficiency in energy use.