A Krueger-Mitchell Grid Analysis of Geo-Thermal Heat

Reciently, the Municipal Council of the City of Brandon undertook to provide home composters at deep discounts to its citizens in order to reduct the amount of garbage flowing into its landfill site. They felt that over the long-haul, their investment would pay for itself many times over, and the environment would be the better for their efforts.Although their initial experiment with the concept was somewhat controversial in its execution, it certainly did stimulate some thought about what else we might do to stimulate more responsible interaction with our environment.

Several years ago, Manitoba Hydro (?) offered a similarly motivated proactive program to encourage citizens of Manitoba to conserve fuel by increasing the heat effeciency of their homes. Rebates on reciepted expenses for insulation up to a set amount, and low-interest loans on larger projects have indeed saved many of us a great deal of money over the years, and reduced out consumption of fosil fuels.

With the Brandon compost initiative coming so close on the heals of this winter's drastic rise in home heating fuel costs, an issue is rasied as to whether it is time to look at financially assisting citizens of the city of Brandon to convert their home-heating systems from fosil fuel to geo-thermal heat, through a program of economic incentives. This paper will examine whether such concept is worth exploring in greater depth.

Bruce (?) Mitchell, in his Geography and Resource analysis ()presents a three dimentional grid for orchestrating a systematic and thorough analysis of natural resources, and the topics, problems and issues related to resource usage. Two dimentions of the cube are the dimensions of space (local, regional, national, and international) and time (past present and future). As he indicates that thorough analyses of just one catagory on each of these two dimentions is a task of considerable magnatude, this analysis of Geo- thermal heat will be restricted to the local area of Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, and the present time (May, 2001). This paper is, after all, a preliminary exploration of the issue only.

The third side of Kreuger and Mitchell's natural resource analysis grid is made up of seven catagories which will form the sub-sections of this analysis. Under these seven headings we will examine the biophysical, economic, social, political, legal, institutional, and technological aspects of geo-thermal heat.

These seven aspects are examined on the pages below, followed by a concluding recommendation: