First-in-the-Nation Geothermal Heating and Cooling System Comes to Massachusetts
By Phil McKenna, Inside Climate News.
Excerpt: FRAMINGHAM, Mass.—After years of planning and months of drilling, a first-in-the-nation, neighborhood-scale geothermal heating and cooling project came online here on Tuesday. Geothermal energy—using the steady temperature below ground—to heat and cool buildings is nothing new. What’s new in Framingham is the fact that climate advocates and a utility company, Eversource, devised the plan together. ...Rather than build individual systems, the Framingham project ties together 31 residential and five commercial buildings that now share the underground infrastructure needed to heat and cool them. ...it may offer a new lease on life for gas utilities without squeezing low income individuals. ...air-source heat pumps that pull heat out of the surrounding air, like an air conditioner run in reverse ...can be costly.... “If we only have the people who can afford it, who have the know-how transitioning, it’s kind of spotty,” said Ania Camargo, thermal energy networks manager at the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a nonprofit working to eliminate fossil fuels from buildings. “It ...creates a negative feedback loop with fewer and fewer people left on the gas system to cover all of the fixed costs. ...the price of gas goes way up and you have what they call a utility death spiral.” Geothermal heating built and maintained by utility companies could offer a future for the companies, and their employees, without leaving low income families on the hook for maintaining an aging gas system....