The ground is humming with geothermal energy that could heat or cool our homes – and now the big US utilities are starting to take note
Snowfall at Times Square, New York, in February. Buildings could draw heat from water pumped from below their foundations, instead of burning natural gas. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
And now the big utilities are beginning to take a good hard look at that system. A couple of months agoPipes run down boreholes 600-700ft deep, where the temperature of the rock is consistently 55F . A mixture of water and propylene glycol pumps through the piping, absorbing that geothermal energy, then flows to 31 residential and five commercial buildings, where fully electric heat pumps use the liquid to either heat or cool a space.
To scale up, a geothermal loop such as Framingham’s might connect to an adjacent neighbourhood, and that one to another. “In the end, what we would like is if the gas utilities become thermal utilities,” said Audrey Schulman, executive director of the nonprofit climate-solutions incubator HEETlabs . “Each individual, shared loop can be interconnected, like Lego blocks, to grow bigger and bigger.”That goal may not be far off, as utilities face increasing regulatory pressure to phase out gas.
A networked geothermal system is extremely efficient. It scores a “coefficient of performance”, or Cop, of 6, meaning for every one unit of energy going in, you get six units of heat out. By contrast, gas furnaces have a Cop of less than 1. But if a utility has perfectly good infrastructure already in the ground to deliver gas, and it is making good money doing so, why would it invest in a new kind of geothermal infrastructure?
Because utilities are still experimenting with these systems, they have not settled on a rate structure. One option may be a flat monthly rate to tap into the geothermal network, depending on how much water a given structure needs to provide adequate heating and cooling.
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