"But can gas utilities learn to love a new business model?"
"In a leafy neighborhood in Framingham, Massachusetts, cars traverse a freshly capped trench conveying a newly implanted pipe below the roadbed. From the jet-black strip of tar at the surface, one could imagine that the local gas company just replaced another of New England’s leaky gas mains. In fact, the infrastructure buried this year in Framingham marks a clean break from fossil-fueled business-as-usual. Rather than delivering combustible methane gas, Framingham's newest piping carries tepid water that’s the lifeblood of a geothermal energy system—technology that could help put gas pipes out of business across the United States.
Unlike most geothermal installations, which serve a single building, the pipes in Framingham function as part of a neighborhood-scale circulatory system for thermal energy—that is, energy that can heat or cool a building. The pipes form a mile-long loop that exchanges heat between buildings and the ground via 90 bore holes, each of them drilled some 600 to 700 feet down into the clay and rock below the city. When the thermal swap started in August, at the height of another brutal New England summer, it brought cooling relief to a fire hall, school, gas station, cabinet shop, city-run housing units for the elderly and disabled, and 22 single-family homes and duplexes.
Heat pumps installed in each building were doing most of the work, using electricity to squeeze heat from inside each building and dump it into the loop’s liquid flow. As New England’s summer swelter gives way to winter chill, the heat pumps will change direction, tapping thermal energy in the flowing water to keep Framingham residents, fire fighters, teachers and students warm. “Some of the heat that’s getting pushed into the ground right now will be used when we switch to heating buildings,” says Zeyneb Magavi, executive director at HEET, the Boston, Massachusetts–based climate group that drove the project’s creation."
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