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Heat pumps are cool. Neighborhood geothermal might be cooler.
A landmark project with major implications for how Americans could cleanly heat and cool their homes broke ground in Framingham, Massachusetts, on Monday.
Eversource, the largest gas and electric utility in New England, began construction on its first “networked geothermal” system. The company will connect 32 residential and five commercial buildings in a single neighborhood to underground water pipes, which will draw on the steady temperature of the ground beneath the earth’s surface to air condition and heat the buildings without fossil fuels.
Clean energy advocates across the country are looking to the demonstration as a test of the idea that natural gas utilities can remain in business in a decarbonized world by managing a network of pipes filled with water instead of climate-warming gas.
“I would say it's not just being watched nationally, it's being watched globally,” Zeyneb Magavi, the co-executive director of the Massachusetts-based clean energy nonprofit HEET, told me. Magavi and her partner, Audrey Schulman, dreamed up the idea of transforming gas utilities into geothermal utilities several years ago, and were instrumental in getting Eversource to consider the project.
“If they succeed enough, and I have no doubt they will, they're gonna be the founding install of a new utility that's going to be the foundation of our future energy system,” she said. “It's not that often that you get to give birth to a new utility.”
Geothermal heating systems have been around for nearly a century, and are known for being incredibly efficient. You may have heard of air-source heat pumps, commonly referred to simply as heat pumps, which function like an air conditioner in the summer and a furnace in the winter by transferring heat inside and outside the building. Geothermal heat pumps work similarly, but they use the ground as a source and sink for heat, rather than the ambient air. (They are different, but related to geothermal power plants, which tap into much hotter reservoirs underground to generate electricity.) Since the ground is a more stable temperature than the air, geothermal heat pumps require less energy. Networked geothermal systems have the potential to reduce energy use even more.
Many individual homes and buildings run on geothermal heating systems today, but all the drilling and piping translates into big upfront costs. Magavi told me the spark of HEET’s idea for a neighborhood-wide system dates back to 2008, when she wanted to install geothermal at her own home, but couldn’t afford it. Later, when she joined HEET and began thinking about what a future without gas could look like, she and Schulman discovered geothermal projects elsewhere in the country, such as a small town in Iowa, and a college campus in Colorado, where multiple buildings were linked to the same pipes. The systems didn’t seem all that different from the gas distribution networks they were looking to replace.
The project in Framingham involves building a new set of pipelines alongside the gas system. Each participating building will get a service pipe connecting it to a main horizontal line that runs through the neighborhood, which is in turn connected to a series of vertical lines that go about 500 feet deep. Water runs through the system, bringing heat up from the ground and delivering it to heat pumps inside the buildings in the winter, or absorbing heat from the homes and dumping it back underground in the summer.
Illustration of a networked geothermal systemAnara Magavi/HEET
The whole system is expected to be up and running by the fall. Eversource estimates the project will cost $14.7 million, and has received approval from regulators to pay for it with ratepayer funds, spread across its entire customer base. Participants will not pay any additional fees on top of the cost to run the heat pump equipment on their electricity bill. They will retain their existing heating and cooling systems, and will have the option to go back to them after the two-year pilot period.
Residents could see a 20% reduction in energy costs, according to Eversource, and around a 60% decrease in carbon emissions, taking into account the current electricity supply. The company will be gathering data throughout the pilot to confirm the actual cost, energy, and carbon savings of the project. “We also want to make a strong business case for why this should be done by the utility and why it makes sense for us to be building out systems like this,” said Eric Bosworth, the senior program manager for clean technologies at Eversource.
Magavi and Schulman see networked geothermal as an elegant solution to one of the biggest challenges of tackling climate change: avoiding what’s known as the utility death-spiral. If people begin swapping out their natural gas heaters for electric heat pumps, they will drive up costs for remaining gas customers, which will motivate more people to go electric, and inflate gas bills even more.
Geothermal presents a path for utilities to retain their customers. They already have the expertise to build and manage underground pipelines and heating equipment. And Magavi argues that if utilities take on the up front costs, it would give people more equitable access to clean energy. “You can just sign up with the utility — you don't have to have upfront capital, knowledge, or time,” she said. “That equity of access is something that is necessary for a just transition.”
If geothermal heating and cooling were to really take off, it could also help with another major climate challenge — the electric grid. The switch to electric vehicles and heat pumps is going to require a massive expansion of clean electricity resources and transmission and distribution wires. Widespread adoption of geothermal heat pumps could minimize that buildout. Boswoth told me that geothermal networks could be strategically deployed in areas that are electrically constrained.
Many climate advocates also like the idea because it presents a clear transition opportunity for natural gas workers, like those in the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union that build and maintain gas pipelines. “Networked geothermal systems could be a promising option for providing high road job opportunities to these workers,” Jenna Tatum of the Building Electrification Institute told me.
But that’s one aspect of the promise of networked geothermal that the Framingham project won’t be demonstrating. Eversource hired a third party construction company and hasn’t entered an agreement with any unions yet, although Bosworth said the company was actively engaged with the Pipefitters Union regarding longer-term geothermal plans.
The pilot in Framingham will be the first networked geothermal system operated by a utility, but it definitely won’t be the last. Massachusetts regulators have approved a handful of additional networked geothermal projects to be owned and operated by Eversource and another gas utility, National Grid. New York State is also moving forward on a number of utility-owned pilots. Several other states, like Minnesota, have also passed laws that encourage gas utilities to pursue geothermal.
“We expect that we're going to see a pretty significant pilot proposal in [utility] plans modeled after the work that's been done out East,” Joe Dammel, managing director of buildings for Fresh Energy, a Minnesota-based clean energy nonprofit, told me.
One challenge that’s come up as the idea has taken off is that no one can seem to agree about what it should be called. While the term is “networked geothermal” in Massachusetts, New York is using “thermal energy network.” Magavi said it’s also been referred to as “community geothermal,” a “thermal highway,” an ATL or “ambient temperature loop,” a “heatnet” and a “5G” network. All of this is further complicated by the fact that the terms “geothermal energy,” “heat pumps,” and “district energy,” can all refer to fundamentally different technologies.
“It’s a nightmare,” she told me. She said she’s initiated a campaign with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Department of Energy to set language standards. “There’s a survey currently going out to everyone to ask them what they think about all the different names.”
The Framingham pilot could be significantly expanded if all goes well. HEET collaborated with Eversource to apply for funding from the Department of Energy for a second networked geothermal system in the city that would be connected to the first one, and was recently awarded a $717,000 grant.
Advocates like Magavi hope these projects will turn into a full-on transition strategy for utilities to move away from a business model based on gas or other fuels. At the groundbreaking on Monday, Eversource chairman, president, and CEO Joe Nolan made a bold statement that seemed to support that notion. “As we transition to a carbon-free future, this is going to be the answer for everybody,” he said. “And it’s all starting right here.”
But when I talked to Bosworth, he qualified that at this point the company sees geothermal as one “tool in the proverbial toolbelt.” Like many utilities, Eversource is also exploring the potential to deliver lower-carbon fuels like biogas and hydrogen through its gas lines.
“We want to take a look at any and all potential pathways and really vet them for what is viable, and what works where,” Bosworth told me. “We will use a combined approach to get to our carbon neutrality goals.”
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And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.
2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.
3. Imperial County, California – The board of directors for the agriculture-saturated Imperial Irrigation District in southern California has approved a resolution opposing solar projects on farmland.
4. New England – Offshore wind opponents are starting to win big in state negotiations with developers, as officials once committed to the energy sources delay final decisions on maintaining contracts.
5. Barren County, Kentucky – Remember the National Park fighting the solar farm? We may see a resolution to that conflict later this month.
6. Washington County, Arkansas – It seems that RES’ efforts to build a wind farm here are leading the county to face calls for a blanket moratorium.
7. Westchester County, New York – Yet another resort town in New York may be saying “no” to battery storage over fire risks.
Solar and wind projects are getting swept up in the blowback to data center construction, presenting a risk to renewable energy companies who are hoping to ride the rise of AI in an otherwise difficult moment for the industry.
The American data center boom is going to demand an enormous amount of electricity and renewables developers believe much of it will come from solar and wind. But while these types of energy generation may be more easily constructed than, say, a fossil power plant, it doesn’t necessarily mean a connection to a data center will make a renewable project more popular. Not to mention data centers in rural areas face complaints that overlap with prominent arguments against solar and wind – like noise and impacts to water and farmland – which is leading to unfavorable outcomes for renewable energy developers more broadly when a community turns against a data center.
“This is something that we’re just starting to see,” said Matthew Eisenson, a senior fellow with the Renewable Energy Legal Defense Initiative at the Columbia University Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “It’s one thing for environmentalists to support wind and solar projects if the idea is that those projects will eventually replace coal power plants. But it’s another thing if those projects are purely being built to meet incremental demand from data centers.”
We’ve started to see evidence of this backlash in certain resort towns fearful of a new tech industry presence and the conflicts over transmission lines in Maryland. But it is most prominent in Virginia, ground zero for American hyperscaler data centers. As we’ve previously discussed in The Fight, rural Virginia is increasingly one of the hardest places to get approval for a solar farm in the U.S., and while there are many reasons the industry is facing issues there, a significant one is the state’s data center boom.
I spent weeks digging into the example of Mecklenburg County, where the local Board of Supervisors in May indefinitely banned new solar projects and is rejecting those that were in the middle of permitting when the decision came down. It’s also the site of a growing data center footprint. Microsoft, which already had a base of operations in the county’s town of Boydton, is in the process of building a giant data center hub with three buildings and an enormous amount of energy demand. It’s this sudden buildup of tech industry infrastructure that is by all appearances driving a backlash to renewable energy in the county, a place that already had a pre-existing high opposition risk in the Heatmap Pro database.
It’s not just data centers causing the ban in Mecklenburg, but it’s worth paying attention to how the fight over Big Tech and solar has overlapped in the county, where Sierra Club’s Virginia Chapter has worked locally to fight data center growth with a grassroots citizens group, Friends of the Meherrin River, that was a key supporter of the solar moratorium, too.
In a conversation with me this week, Tim Cywinski, communications director for the state’s Sierra Club chapter, told me municipal leaders like those in Mecklenburg are starting to group together renewables and data centers because, simply put, rural communities enter into conversations with these outsider business segments with a heavy dose of skepticism. This distrust can then be compounded when errors are made, such as when one utility-scale solar farm – Geenex’s Grasshopper project – apparently polluted a nearby creek after soil erosion issues during construction, a problem project operator Dominion Energy later acknowledged and has continued to be a pain point for renewables developers in the county.
“I don’t think the planning that has been presented to rural America has been adequate enough,” the Richmond-based advocate said. “Has solar kind of messed up in a lot of areas in rural America? Yeah, and that’s given those communities an excuse to roll them in with a lot of other bad stuff.”
Cywinski – who describes himself as “not your typical environmentalist” – says the data center space has done a worse job at community engagement than renewables developers in Virginia, and that the opposition against data center projects in places like Chesapeake and Fauquier is more intense, widespread, and popular than the opposition to renewables he’s seeing play out across the Commonwealth.
But, he added, he doesn’t believe the fight against data centers is “mutually exclusive” from conflicts over solar. “I’m not going to tout the gospel of solar while I’m trying to fight a data center for these people because it’s about listening to them, hearing their concerns, and then not telling them what to say but trying to help them elevate their perspective and their concerns,” Cywinski said.
As someone who spends a lot of time speaking with communities resisting solar and trying to best understand their concerns, I agree with Cywinksi: the conflict over data centers speaks to the heart of the rural vs. renewables divide, and it offers a warning shot to anyone thinking AI will help make solar and wind more popular.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is one signature away from becoming law and drastically changing the economics of renewables development in the U.S. That doesn’t mean decarbonization is over, experts told Heatmap, but it certainly doesn’t help.
What do we do now?
That’s the question people across the climate change and clean energy communities are asking themselves now that Congress has passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which would slash most of the tax credits and subsidies for clean energy established under the Inflation Reduction Act.
Preliminary data from Princeton University’s REPEAT Project (led by Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins) forecasts that said bill will have a dramatic effect on the deployment of clean energy in the U.S., including reducing new solar and wind capacity additions by almost over 40 gigawatts over the next five years, and by about 300 gigawatts over the next 10. That would be enough to power 150 of Meta’s largest planned data centers by 2035.
But clean energy development will hardly grind to a halt. While much of the bill’s implementation is in question, the bill as written allows for several more years of tax credit eligibility for wind and solar projects and another year to qualify for them by starting construction. Nuclear, geothermal, and batteries can claim tax credits into the 2030s.
Shares in NextEra, which has one of the largest clean energy development businesses, have risen slightly this year and are down just 6% since the 2024 election. Shares in First Solar, the American solar manufacturer, are up substantially Thursday from a day prior and are about flat for the year, which may be a sign of investors’ belief that buyer demand for solar panels will persist — or optimism that the OBBBA’s punishing foreign entity of concern requirements will drive developers into the company’s arms.
Partisan reversals are hardly new to climate policy. The first Trump administration gleefully pulled the rug from under the Obama administration’s power plant emissions rules, and the second has been thorough so far in its assault on Biden’s attempt to replace them, along with tailpipe emissions standards and mileage standards for vehicles, and of course, the IRA.
Even so, there are ways the U.S. can reduce the volatility for businesses that are caught in the undertow. “Over the past 10 to 20 years, climate advocates have focused very heavily on D.C. as the driver of climate action and, to a lesser extent, California as a back-stop,” Hannah Safford, who was director for transportation and resilience in the Biden White House and is now associate director of climate and environment at the Federation of American Scientists, told Heatmap. “Pursuing a top down approach — some of that has worked, a lot of it hasn’t.”
In today’s environment, especially, where recognition of the need for action on climate change is so politically one-sided, it “makes sense for subnational, non-regulatory forces and market forces to drive progress,” Safford said. As an example, she pointed to the fall in emissions from the power sector since the late 2000s, despite no power plant emissions rule ever actually being in force.
“That tells you something about the capacity to deliver progress on outcomes you want,” she said.
Still, industry groups worry that after the wild swing between the 2022 IRA and the 2025 OBBA, the U.S. has done permanent damage to its reputation as a business-friendly environment. Since continued swings at the federal level may be inevitable, building back that trust and creating certainty is “about finding ballasts,” Harry Godfrey, the managing director for Advanced Energy United’s federal priorities team, told Heatmap.
The first ballast groups like AEU will be looking to shore up is state policy. “States have to step up and take a leadership role,” he said, particularly in the areas that were gutted by Trump’s tax bill — residential energy efficiency and electrification, transportation and electric vehicles, and transmission.
State support could come in the form of tax credits, but that’s not the only tool that would create more certainty for businesses — considering the budget cuts states will face as a result of Trump’s tax bill, it also might not be an option. But a lot can be accomplished through legislative action, executive action, regulatory reform, and utility ratemaking, Godfrey said. He cited new virtual power plant pilot programs in Virginia and Colorado, which will require further regulatory work to “to get that market right.”
A lot of work can be done within states, as well, to make their deployment of clean energy more efficient and faster. Tyler Norris, a fellow at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, pointed to Texas’ “connect and manage” model for connecting renewables to the grid, which allows projects to come online much more quickly than in the rest of the country. That’s because the state’s electricity market, ERCOT, does a much more limited study of what grid upgrades are needed to connect a project to the grid, and is generally more tolerant of curtailing generation (i.e. not letting power get to the grid at certain times) than other markets.
“As Texas continues to outpace other markets in generator and load interconnections, even in the absence of renewable tax credits, it seems increasingly plausible that developers and policymakers may conclude that deeper reform is needed to the non-ERCOT electricity markets,” Norris told Heatmap in an email.
At the federal level, there’s still a chance for, yes, bipartisan permitting reform, which could accelerate the buildout of all kinds of energy projects by shortening their development timelines and helping bring down costs, Xan Fishman, senior managing director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Heatmap. “Whether you care about energy and costs and affordability and reliability or you care about emissions, the next priority should be permitting reform,” he said.
And Godfrey hasn’t given up on tax credits as a viable tool at the federal level, either. “If you told me in mid-November what this bill would look like today, while I’d still be like, Ugh, that hurts, and that hurts, and that hurts, I would say I would have expected more rollbacks. I would have expected deeper cuts,” he told Heatmap. Ultimately, many of the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits will stick around in some form, although we’ve yet to see how hard the new foreign sourcing requirements will hit prospective projects.
While many observers ruefully predicted that the letter-writing moderate Republicans in the House and Senate would fold and support whatever their respective majorities came up with — which they did, with the sole exception of Pennsylvania Republican Brian Fitzpatrick — the bill also evolved over time with input from those in the GOP who are not openly hostile to the clean energy industry.
“You are already seeing people take real risk on the Republican side pushing for clean energy,” Safford said, pointing to Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who opposed the new excise tax on wind and solar added to the Senate bill, which earned her vote after it was removed.
Some damage has already been done, however. Canceled clean energy investments adds up to $23 billion so far this year, compared to just $3 billion in all of 2024, according to the decarbonization think tank RMI. And that’s before OBBBA hits Trump’s desk.
The start-and-stop nature of the Inflation Reduction Act may lead some companies, states, local government and nonprofits to become leery of engaging with a big federal government climate policy again.
“People are going to be nervous about it for sure,” Safford said. “The climate policy of the future has to be polycentric. Even if you have the political opportunity to make a big swing again, people will be pretty gun shy. You will need to pursue a polycentric approach.”
But to Godfrey, all the back and forth over the tax credits, plus the fact that Republicans stood up to defend them in the 11th hour, indicates that there is a broader bipartisan consensus emerging around using them as a tool for certain energy and domestic manufacturing goals. A future administration should think about refinements that will create more enduring policy but not set out in a totally new direction, he said.
Albert Gore, the executive director of the Zero Emissions Transportation Association, was similarly optimistic that tax credits or similar incentives could work again in the future — especially as more people gain experience with electric vehicles, batteries, and other advanced clean energy technologies in their daily lives. “The question is, how do you generate sufficient political will to implement that and defend it?” he told Heatmap. “And that depends on how big of an economic impact does it have, and what does it mean to the American people?”
Ultimately, Fishman said, the subsidy on-off switch is the risk that comes with doing major policy on a strictly partisan basis.
“There was a lot of value in these 10-year timelines [for tax credits in the IRA] in terms of business certainty, instead of one- or two- year extensions,” Fishman told Heatmap. “The downside that came with that is that it became affiliated with one party. It was seen as a partisan effort, and it took something that was bipartisan and put a partisan sheen on it.”
The fight for tax credits may also not be over yet. Before passage of the IRA, tax credits for wind and solar were often extended in a herky-jerky bipartisan fashion, where Democrats who supported clean energy in general and Republicans who supported it in their districts could team up to extend them.
“You can see a world where we have more action on clean energy tax credits to enhance, extend and expand them in a future congress,” Fishman told Heatmap. “The starting point for Republican leadership, it seemed, was completely eliminating the tax credits in this bill. That’s not what they ended up doing.”