A gas utility and climate advocates in Framingham offer a vision for the future: cleaner, cheaper energy - The Boston Globe (2024)

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 gas company 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.

For gas utilities in Massachusetts, getting into neighborhood geothermal may also offer a new lease on life as the state transitions away from fossil fuels to cleaner forms of energy in its efforts to combat climate change.

For customers, the shared model offers the prospect of lower heating and cooling bills. Overall, people looped into the Framingham geothermal network are expecting to see their electric bills drop by 20 percent on average, with Eversource picking up the cost of installation.

Eversource’s $14 million project in Framingham, which broke ground in June 2023, pulls thermal energy from approximately 90 boreholes, or wells, drilled 600 to 700 feet underground where temperatures are a steady 55 degrees.

A mix of water and antifreeze flows through a mile-long loop buried just below ground, then descends into the wells where it is heated or cooled, depending on the time of year. The pipe network connects to a heat pump inside each building that extracts additional heat from the water to warm the buildings in winter, or transfers heat from the buildings into the water to cool them in summer.

“I think of the Earth as a big battery,” said Bruno. “This is the most efficient way to heat and cool your home.”

Approximately 135 customers are now connected to the system including low- and moderate-income customers living in single-family homes. The project also feeds Framingham Housing Authority apartment buildings, a gas station, and the Corner Cabinet, a kitchen and bath cabinet showroom.

Gina Richard, the owner of Corner Cabinet, said she felt “pretty lucky” to be part of the project. She currently uses two air conditioners and two heaters and looks forward to replacing all that with a single system. Richard said she was told she could see her winter heating bill of $900 to $1,000 go down by as much as a third, which she said would be “amazing.”

For Jennifer Mauchan who lives in a Cape Cod-style house in Framingham, opting into the project was a no-brainer.

“As soon as they told me about it, I bought in 100 percent,” said Mauchan, remembering her first meeting with representatives from Eversource. “From a financial perspective, I thought that it was a very viable option for us.” She also cited lower greenhouse gases that cause climate change as an important factor in the decision.

For Audrey Schulman, the cofounder of HEET, a nonprofit climate advocacy and research organization based in Boston, Tuesday’s commissioning was a dream come true. The organization first proposed geothermal projects to the state’s gas utilities back in 2017.

“This is greater impact than I could ever have imagined,” said Schulman.

Part of what makes geothermal systems appealing is that they use far less energy than other sources of heating and cooling. For every one unit of energy you put into a gas boiler, for example, you get less than one unit out because some of the heat is lost when it goes up the chimney or exhaust system.

“With networked geothermal, for every one unit of energy used, you can move into your building six units of heat, or move six units of heat out of your building if it’s summer,” Schulman said.

Part of that high efficiency comes from combining different types of buildings with different heating and cooling needs into a single network.

The gas and electric utility National Grid is developing a similar geothermal pilot project in Lowell and has announced plans for a second project with the Boston Housing Authority in Dorchester. A total of 13 states are considering pilot projects or advancing legislation that would allow gas utilities to develop networked geothermal heating and cooling.

For networked geothermal to take off, however, state laws will need to be updated to allow utilities to own, operate, and sell thermal energy to their customers, climate advocates say.

A bill currently being considered by the Massachusetts Legislature would amend existing rules to allow gas utilities to provide thermal energy, not just gas. Meanwhile, Eversource and HEET are already working on how to expand Framingham’s geothermal system.

In April 2023, HEET, Eversource, and the city of Framingham received a $715,000 grant from the US Department of Energy to begin designing an expansion of the geothermal heating and cooling system before the initial project even came online. The groups may be eligible to apply for additional federal funding to expand the project later this year.

“We are already working on a version two of this loop,” Eversource’s Bruno said.

This story is published in partnership with Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.