Entire Neighborhood Has Shared Solar Heating

I find this technology interesting because it won't work well for an individual, you must cooperate to make it work. The heat is stored using boreholes to heat a volume of the earth underground. The surface area/volume ratio is against a single user, but becomes more favorable as the number of participants increases.

This is a good idea. In the past, we got by with just giving everyone electricity and having them turn that into whatever they needed, but since it's inefficient to convert sunlight -> electricity, it's now more economical [1] to just pipe hot water to people's homes.

Hopefully they system can be enhanced with the ability to carry cooling water to the houses also.

[1] Actually, this probably costs a lot more than electricity right now, but it's the most economical way to get solar heat. Some day there won't be cheap energy, but there will always be sunlight.