Name: How a Scottish club turned body heat into energy
Uploaded: 2025-10-09T18:39:21.000Z
Duration: 10 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

What if you could help the planet by sweating on the dance floor?

If we take the big venue, galvanizers, for example, you have 1200 people dancing and you're capturing the heat from those people dancing.

You can heat about 70 houses with that heat.

It's a solution born out of a collaboration between two business leaders in Scotland which mixes geothermal energy with a natural heat source.

Clubbers felt very kind of relatable, you know, and I love that.

It's like you are actually participating in this.

It's not like this sustainability system that these smart people at some energy company have kind of come up with.

It's like, come here and dance, do what you do every Friday, Saturday night, and

The first time I met Andrew was in late 2019.

I had been introduced by someone who I knew through a mutual friend.

He is such a great ideas guy and he has a really strong ambition for SWG3 to get to net zero by 2025.

So I got introduced to David, not really knowing where that conversation was going to lead.

We chatted for 20 minutes about this wonderful space.

She's obviously got a love for music and I do remember very vividly.

And he kind of got stopped in his tracks and just started to think through it occurred to me that all this heat that people are generating when they're dancing is a source of renewable energy.

We can capture this, we can store it in the ground and we can use it again for heating the next day or the next week or the next month or even later.

Literally during that conversation, the concept for Body Heat kind of emerged.

We both got really excited about this concept and he said, how do we make this happen?

The Body Heat system is a heating and cooling system that captures heat from a venue.

Here, SWG3 cools down the space, keeps everyone the right temperature by taking that body heat out through some heat pumps in a plant room and then into an array of boreholes, charging up those boreholes as a big thermal battery in the ground.

And then during the week, during the day, when the venue needs heating, we pull the heat back out through the heat pumps and back into the venue.

A lot of businesses perhaps are very focused on their profit margins.

Andrew's business is independent and therefore able to have a really strong social and environmental focus.

And I never started Town Rock Energy with the view of, right, we have to make lots of money, we have to make lots of profit.

It's really about we want to find great solutions to the energy transition.

When I found out that there was an owner of a very cool, very famous venue that I had been to many times who wanted to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2025 and this is so ahead of the curve, I knew that I was going to get along with him.

We're obviously in very different fields.

Our kind of ambitions are actually quite aligned.

I certainly felt a responsibility, you know, I think we all did going back to Covid and just seeing the world just fall away.

And it was a bit of a reminder that we live at such a fast pace, kind of forget where our priorities are.

So I'm a dad, so I've got kids obviously and you know, I'm just thinking about what music venues are going to look like for them in 10, 20 years time.

So for me it's really important that this place and others are around for people to enjoy that side of life.

It was quite a big commercial commitment.

It was definitely the right move at the right time.

Total range of anything from 40, 50 person kind of intimate gigs in the poetry club through to 2000 cap clubs and in the yard we do 4000 capacity outdoor shows in the summer which is a kind of real focal point of the music program.

So yeah, total range of events that we do here.

These events as well as hiring out the venue are the main sources of revenue for SWG3.

But a project this size can be difficult to self fund so the club also secured outside investment.

We were going through a large capital investment at that time anyway which totalled about 5 million.

So we were raising a lot of money and the total capital outlay was about 600,000 give or take 10 around the project.

We scaled up the team at the time so we also acquired some innovation funding to support that growth which meant we were in a two month period, we hired seven new staff and we suddenly had capacity.

A concert attended by 1200 people produces 800 kilowatt hours of heat in the 6000 square foot space.

Figuring out how to reutilize that however, wasn't an easy venture.

Despite Town Rock Energy's experience in the industry.

This building is 13,000 square foot and next door is 10,11,000 square feet.

So huge area, huge demand for heating, cooling, especially during the night when the events are on.

So Friday night's going to be very busy in here in about three, four hours.

But you'll feel the temperature rise very quickly so that cooling load will come in.

One of the challenges, you know, one of the big cost items here is that it's an old building that has been retrofit.

Then you're putting new plumbing in through very old walls, New electrical through very old walls.

So we put the plant room in a shipping container outside the building.

We were installing it just as we were getting back trading.

So we were obviously very reluctant not to shut down again.

So our business was just slightly on its knees.

With cultural programming shut down across the country, the sector saw revenue plummet.

This also impacted energy bill projections for SWG3.

Concrete data on savings will be available next year.

But for now, the club says it is meeting its renewable targets and is on track for its 20, 25 net zero goals.

We could have constructed it quickly, but we actually decided that we could not disrupt the space.

So the business stayed open as usual the entire time.

And then plumbers, electricians, drillers were coming in in the hours around that.

So that it didn't affect the business at all.

There's been many challenges with the body heat design.

So you know, it's been designed, it's been redesigned, it's been costed.

We've all gone, oh no, we can't do that, we've gone reback in.

I mean, I didn't know anything about geothermal engineering before meeting David.

I really admire Andrew's culture that he's built.

It feels like he's both in charge and leading his organization, but

also close friends with a lot of the people he works with.

And that just creates a really motivating culture.

Tanrok energy has worked on similar projects using a mix of geothermal energy and existent heating and cooling solutions.

For example, in Inverness, the company developed a system to produce warm water from sediments next to the river ness in order to heat a 150 room hotel.

Another venture involved Lenchester Wines where the teams worked on two large mine water heat pumps, recovering warm water from a flooded coal mine.

To adjust temperatures in the warehouses.

The hardest part to navigate is the very start.

You know, we want to sit down and look at the geology, look at the building, look at the plans for the building and just say, look, these are the options and make that really, really low entry cost to give those answers.

So what does the finished product look like?

We got a tour Here we have several cassette units in the ceiling and they are providing warm or cold air into the venue.

Just by cooling down the air in the venue.

The heat then goes through these pipes which carries a refrigerant loop back to the plant room.

Down this side, they are providing heating and cooling to the venue via these pipes.

And then via this pipe, it's sending the heat or pulling the heat from the boreholes in the community garden.

The main pipes from the plant room come underneath here and then connect into the manifold which is just up here.

So they're taking all the flow to and from the plant room and then inside this manhole chamber, it's splitting across all 12 boreholes and we can see the temperature of each borehole.

The demand for energy globally continues to grow.

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How a Scottish club turned body heat into energy

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