One question though: why do they need a special high-tech material to do this? Why can't they just bubble warm air through cold water in the summer and vice-versa in the winter? Water has very large heat capacity, 400x that of air by volume.
PS.
Quote from Wikipedia for downvoters:
High tech is often viewed as high risk, but offering the opportunity for high profits.
Fact: Chemically produced lye dates back to at least 1791 with the Leblanc process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leblanc_process
Fact: your processor is made from sand which was discovered by first human ever.
Processors are made from sand in the same way people are made from carbon. You're skipping a few important steps.
Is the Large Hadron Collider not high tech if it doesn't turn a profit?
I'd imagine there's not enough water to do this inland..
How much water do we need? I wouldn't try to affect large regions, just specific urban areas. The water doesn't actually have to go anywhere, it just sits around storing heat. All we have to do is bubble a lot of air through it. As a nice side benefit, this should clean the air.
(This is my version of the Reber Plan).
>I'd imagine there's not enough water to do this inland..
We quite often forget that there's no physical limitation on the amount of water available inland. Water is constantly flowing from the oceans onto land, being recycled (mainly by trees pushing it back up into the airstream), and flowing back out and mixing with the ocean.
So the amount of water per square meter of land is limited by only two variables:
* The rate at which fresh water falls on land (liters/hectare/year)
* The time it takes that water to flow to the ocean (years).
The amount of water available on land (liters/hectare) is simply these two quantities divided by each-other.
The flow is fundamentally limited by the energy balance of the sun, so there's not much we can do there. But the time is entirely determined by our ability to design infrastructure and land use patterns that store water on the land in useful catchments instead of draining it off rapidly. Farm-scale dams are one visible way of doing that, but it's much cheaper to store water in the ground via infiltration systems.
The amount of water is inversely proportional to the amount of time it takes water to flow back to the ocean after it falls. So if we want to "wet up" the landscape, we should make it follow a loooong path with a lot of passive friction and storage buffers.
Just to show my math here, in the USA on average there's 715 mm of rainfall per year, which works out to 19,000 gallons for the average 100 m^2 house footprint. And next year you get that much water again.
In extremely arid areas like California it would even be possible to use salt water for thermal storage.
High concentrations of NaOH in water are strongly basic. It will corrode many oxide-based ceramics (like toilet bowls) and aluminum, but it's no problem for most other common metals and plastics.
...and human flash quite rapidly. So if your NaOH radiator leaks you might get sprayed with meat dissolving viscous liquid.