Eversource Transitions From Gas Company To Geothermal Company In Framingham – CleanTechnica

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Heat pumps are much more efficient than oil furnaces or gas boilers. They produce double or triple the heat per unit of energy. They cost more to purchase and install, but the savings allow them to pay for themselves after a few years. Most residential heat pumps are air source units, which means their performance is dependent on the temperature of the air outside. That means they must be optimized for the environment they operate in. There are heat pumps on the market today that provide heat just fine in sub-zero weather, but they may not be quite as good at making cold air in the summer when it is hot outside. By the same token, some heat pumps do a great job of cooling in the summer but struggle to make heat in the winter. Geothermal heat pumps solve that dilemma.

The temperature of the Earth 50 to 200 feet below the surface remains quite constant all year long. That means a heat pump designed to operate at that temperature can work as efficiently as possible in all seasons. Call it Heat Pump 2.0. As efficient as air source heat pumps are, ground source heat pumps are even more so. There is one problem. Getting a company to come to your house to drill a few holes in the Earth so you can send water down one pipe to be warmed or cooled by the Earth and then pipe it back to the surface is expensive. Google tried this with its Dandelion spinoff but the high cost made it a tough sell in the residential market. The added efficiency was a good thing, but the upfront investment was too much for most homeowners.

But what if instead of drilling hundreds of holes for hundreds of homes, you drilled just a few and distributed the constant-temperature water to residences and commercial buildings just like the gas company in many cities distributes its gas? Better yet, what if the gas company, instead of fighting the idea, decided to install the pipes to distribute the water from those geothermal wells, thereby having a new product to offer its existing customers? That’s exactly what has happened in the Metro West city of Framingham, Massachusetts.

Geothermal Comes To Framingham

In June, Eversource, the local gas and electric utility company, completed a geothermal system in Framingham that provides heating and cooling for an entire neighborhood, including public housing residents, by tapping low temperature thermal heat from underground wells. It is the first geothermal system ever built by a gas utility, but more than that, it serves as a demonstration project that could chart a new course for methane (natural gas) distribution companies to transitioning away from gas while preserving jobs. The job of installing and maintaining pipes is what utility companies do. They have the right equipment and the knowledge to do it well. Why not put that expertise to work to help communities lower their emissions while keeping the current workforce fully employed?

On December 3, 2024, Massachusetts governor Maura Healey signed legislation allowing gas utilities to move beyond pilot projects by granting them permission to provide geothermal heating and cooling as an alternative to gas throughout their service areas. Seven other states have recently passed similar legislation, and countries across central Asia could soon build similar projects, according to Inside Climate News. “It’s taking root across the country, across the world,” Zayneb Magavi, 51, the executive director of HEET, a Boston nonprofit working to develop neighborhood-scale geothermal heating and cooling systems, said recently. “We have a once in many lifetimes opportunity to transform an industry, to build a better energy system and a more sustainable world. We just need to be brave enough to listen to the other side.”

One Sentence Changed The Geothermal Conversation

In 2016, Magavi, who is a physicist, and other activists attended a meeting with people from Eversource, including Bill Akley, who was president of gas operations for the company at that time. He assumed he was in for an earful. “My expectations were, it’s going to be a list of demands and a lot of poking at all the things we’re doing wrong,” he said recently. Prior to the meeting, the activists had “categorically attacked” the entire gas industry by calling out locations of hundreds of gas leaks across the city of Cambridge.

The odds of the meeting being successful were slight. Magavi was focused primarily on how to address climate change by getting people to stop burning fossil fuels entirely. A climate law Massachusetts passed in 2021 effectively required as much by 2050. However, no one knew how to get homes off gas without laying off an entire industry of workers or leaving low-income ratepayers on the hook for maintaining a dwindling system of underground pipes.

At the meeting in 2016, she said, “‘I have three children and I am worried about their future. I want to do something to help protect their future, because I feel it’s unethical for us not to act.” She told ICN there was a moment of uncomfortable silence before Akley looked at her and said, “Well, I have three kids too.” That, as it turns out, became the common ground the group needed to forge an alliance. Eversource ended up working with the groups who came to that meeting to find and plug the biggest gas leaks in Cambridge.

In the summer of 2017, Magavi frequently worked alongside gas company work crews. Seeing them go down into trenches to address leaks from pipes, some of which dated back as far as the 1800s, made an impression. “I grew to have a lot of respect for them and a lot of appreciation for the risk they take to keep us safe,” she said. At one point, HEET and the utility company jointly developed a plan to address the biggest leaks and were preparing to make their case to state regulators for approval. To get it across the finish line with the Department of Public Utilities, the two groups intended to present the plan together. “There were these repeated moments where generosity was met with reciprocity and it built trust,” Magavi said. She is now a guest lecturer for Harvard University’s sustainability leadership program and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.

When HEET decided to propose the idea of building a geothermal system in Framingham, that trust became an essential factor. When it was proposed to Akley and other gas company executives in late 2017, there were lots of questions but few blank stares. At the time, HEET and other advocacy groups were also meeting with state policymakers to redefine what it means to be a gas utility in Massachusetts. They were seeking a change in rules that would give gas utilities, which were only allowed to offer gas service, permission to offer thermal heat as an alternative.

“The three of them were so smart, so impressive … you kind of got sucked into their enthusiasm,” state Sen. Cynthia Stone Creem said of her first meeting with Magavi, Marilyn Ray Smith from the climate advocacy group Gas Leaks Allies (now Gas Transition Allies), and Audrey Schulman, the co-founder of HEET. “Even though it was like, ‘What are they talking about?’” She quickly got up to speed on networked geothermal heating and cooling and filed a bill in 2019 that would allow gas utilities to offer this service. When it didn’t pass, she kept trying. That’s the bill that Governor Healey signed to put the geothermal measures into law at a ceremony earlier this month.

Red, Blue, Yellow … And Purple

Utilities mark their infrastructure where it passes beneath city streets with color-coded spray paint — red for electric lines, blue for water mains, yellow for gas pipes. For networked geothermal, the color is purple. It’s a selection Magavi advocated for because the water that runs through these single-pipe systems is neither red hot nor ice cold, but somewhere in between. Magavi also liked it because it suggests an energy system that is nonpartisan.

More than 20 geothermal pilot projects are currently being proposed nationwide, including two underway in Massachusetts by National Grid. Nikki Bruno, vice president for clean technologies at Eversource Energy, said the company is still assessing costs both for its initial project in Framingham and for the potential buildout of future systems. One of the biggest costs for the initial project was retrofitting and weatherizing the older buildings that already had other types of heating systems and poor insulation. She said the company plans to file requests with state regulators to build additional geothermal systems but will likely focus on new construction to avoid those extra costs.

One exception will be an expansion of the Framingham geothermal system, pending state approval, thanks to a $7.8 million construction grant from the U.S. Department of Energy awarded to HEET, Eversource, and the city of Framingham on December 11, 2024. “It’s a beautiful development of the relationship over the years, and this feels like a continued upward path,” Bruno said of HEET’s leading role in the grant application. “We started talking about methane leaks on our gas distribution system, and now here we are together on a grant application to build what will be the first-in-the-nation utility expansion on a geothermal network.”

International Implications

For Magavi, there is no slowing down. Next month she plans to fly to Pakistan where she will meet with gas utility executives interested in building networked geothermal heating and cooling systems in that country. The trip is part of an initiative organized by the International Finance Corp, a member of the World Bank Group that lends to private companies. The IFC seeks to help finance the construction of such systems on a massive scale—enough to heat and cool the equivalent of tens of thousands of homes—in each of seven countries across the Middle East and Central Asia.

The IFC project stemmed in part from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent interest in developing energy alternatives to gas. Magavi is an adviser on the project. “It is clean, it is renewable, so it is a friend to the environment, but also it is a friend to the wallet of the consumer,” Hela Cheikhrouhou, the IFC’s regional vice president for the Middle East, Central Asia, Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan, said, referring to the low operating costs of geothermal systems once they are built. Cheikhrouhou also pointed out that building geothermal networks is labor intensive. “That creates a lot of jobs in geographies where economic demographics are growing,” she said. “So if you want people to have good jobs, this is also a good solution.”