First-in-the-Nation Geothermal Heating and Cooling System Comes to Massachusetts

Eversource Energy, a utility company in Massachusetts, installed a networked geothermal system that provides heat for residential and commercial buildings across the city of Framingham. The connected system allows excess heat from one building to be redirected to another that needs it. It’s the first of its kind in the United States.

Thermal storage technologies are lowering businesses’ energy costs and carbon emissions while reducing strain on the grid during peak times. Two hotels in California implemented a system that makes ice when energy demand is low and uses the ice during peak demand times to cool the building.

In Gateshead, England, Lanchester Wines keeps its storage warehouse at a stable temperature year-round using geothermal heat from an abandoned coal mine nearby. The water that naturally floods the mine is geothermally heated below ground, then a heat pump system pulls that water to the surface to transfer that heat to the warehouse.

A first-of-its-kind renewable energy system in Hengbung, India, creates hydropower with solar pumps to prevent the community from experiencing prolonged power outages during extreme weather. At the same time, the project is increasing India’s renewable energy capacity.

Three startups in Houston are using a technique similar to fracking, a practice used in the oil and gas industry, to store renewable energy without batteries. They use excess renewable energy to pump pressurized water into manmade caverns underground. When energy is needed, they open the caverns, sending the water back to the surface to turn a turbine and generate power.

A direct carbon capture plant in Iceland sucks carbon dioxide out of the air, mixes it with water, and pumps it underground to help combat climate change. When the mixture reaches the basalt bedrock, it causes a chemical reaction that turns the carbon into a solid so it can be stored underground in the porous rock.

Gree Energy helps food processors in Indonesia overcome the financial barriers to installing anaerobic wastewater treatment plants. These plants turn methane emissions into biogas to be used as electricity or thermal energy. The company plans the builds, finds uses for the biogas, and establishes revenue to fund the projects.

Climeworks is focusing on pulling carbon dioxide directly out of the air to store or reuse in some capacity as a way to lower global greenhouse gas emissions. The Swiss company has 16 plants around Europe, with their biggest one in Switzerland that removes 900 tons of carbon dioxide a year that is then sold to Coca-Cola Co. to put in soft drinks or to local industrial greenhouses for plant growth. Scaling the operations to capture more carbon is costly, but the startup recently raised $76 million from investors.

With the prices of solar technology dropping and the opportunity to save drastically on energy usage and costs, businesses and organizations across the country are investing more in solar infrastructure for their buildings and facilities. The Better Buildings Initiative of the US Department of Energy is helping by providing guidance and documenting effective approaches and financing for renewables installations - from hotels, to schools, to big box retail.

An economic shift to renewable energy could take decades, but thanks to rapidly evolving disruptive technologies, dropping prices of solar and wind power sources, and increasing market demand for green business, the new age of renewable energy could encompass the world economy much more quickly.