Tapping the heat beneath your feet with Kathy Hannun of Dandelion Energy

Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. So the ground under your feet. could cool and heat your home. For a relatively low cost. And it doesn't really matter where you live, because as you will hear in this conversation, once you dig about two to five hundred feet deep, In most places around the world, the earth is cool, but also capable of providing heat.

How this works, I will let Kathy Hanoon explain in a moment. Kathy is the founder of a company called Dandelion Energy, and she's on a mission to use the natural thermal system that already exists below ground. To regulate the temperature inside our homes and buildings. It's a system, by the way, widely used in Sweden, and if she can get enough people to adopt it in the US, it could have a massive impact on reducing carbon emissions, and it could save people thousands of dollars a year. Kathy started thinking about geothermal heating and cooling systems back when she was working at X. That's the name of Google's Innovation Lab. Two of Google's most famous internal projects, Waymo, the self-driving car, and Wing, a drone delivery system. Came out of X.

Dandeline Energy was also started there and eventually spun out as a separate company. But at the beginning, Kathy and a team at X were given an open-ended assignment. Dream up big ideas that could make a significant impact. and then try to see if those ideas were workable. I was just hunting around for What is a project?

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.