Geothermal Heating and Cooling System Comes to Massachusetts
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By Phil McKenna
June 4, 2024
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.
“There’s no one entity that’s going to solve this climate crisis alone,” said Nikki Bruno, vice president of clean technologies for Eversource, who also acknowledged the unusual nature of a partnership between a utility and a climate advocacy group. “We have to work as a team, and I think this project has shown that working together gets you somewhere faster and in a better way.”
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. This shared system has been used in places like college campuses, for example, but never before has a utility installed geothermal across a neighborhood in the United States.
“It allows the energy transition to be ramped up, because we’re not going house by house, we’re going neighborhood by neighborhood,” said Priya Gandbhir, senior attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation, based in Boston.
Perhaps more importantly, it may offer a new lease on life for gas utilities without squeezing low income individuals.
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