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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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Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.