A Groundbreaking Geothermal Heating and Cooling Network Saves This Colorado College Money and Water

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By Phil McKenna, Inside Climate News. 

Excerpt: GRAND JUNCTION, Colo.—The discussions started roughly a decade ago, when an account manager at Xcel Energy, the electricity and gas utility provider, expressed confusion, officials at Colorado Mesa University recalled. A public school on the state’s remote western slope, Colorado Mesa had recently doubled in size, but its energy usage had hardly budged as it began installing an advanced geothermal heating and cooling system. Since its geothermal buildout began in 2008, the university has saved more than $15 million in energy costs, money it has passed on to students through lower tuition and more scholarship funding.  Hundreds of boreholes drilled approximately 500 feet beneath athletic fields and parking lots tap low-temperature thermal energy to help heat and cool campus buildings in what is now one of the largest such networks in the nation. ...A boiler that provides backup heat is rarely used. A bigger challenge is managing excess heat in the summer when thermal energy is drawn from buildings to keep them cool. Much of this heat is pumped underground and stored for winter use. Additional heat is used to warm the university’s swimming pool, showers and campus irrigation system. These creative uses of waste heat reduce the university’s need for conventional cooling towers that rely on evaporation. Sound Geothermal estimates that CMU reduced its annual water consumption from the highly constrained Colorado River watershed by 10 million gallons. Xcel Energy commissioned a report on Colorado Mesa’s geothermal system that confirmed the system’s energy savings. A “key advantage” of the University’s thermal network is its ability to share heating and cooling loads, the 2023 report concluded. “This load sharing can happen from room to room, floor to floor, and building to building.” The report measured the system’s “coefficient of performance,” or overall efficiency. A gas boiler, for example, can theoretically have a coefficient of performance as high as one, meaning that for every unit of gas that flows into the boiler, one unit of heat is produced. Air source heat pumps, by comparison, are more efficient. They typically have a higher coefficient of performance, ranging from 2 to 4, because they don’t generate heat; instead, they use fans and compressors to extract heat from outdoor air. ...Colorado Mesa’s system, which draws on geothermal energy, stores heat seasonally in underground borefields, and balances heating and cooling loads between buildings, had a much higher coefficient of performance, ranging from 3.6 to 8.9, depending on the time of year. ...There are now more than twenty utility-led thermal energy networks under development or completed nationwide, according to the Building Decarbonization Coalition. Xcel Energy is currently working on three thermal energy network projects, two in Colorado and one in Minnesota, a spokesperson said in a written statement. ...Geothermal heating and cooling tax credits approved under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 cover 30 percent or more of the total project cost. Unlike its cuts to wind and solar tax credits, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed by Republicans and signed by President Donald Trump in July, largely left geothermal tax credits intact.... 

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