The Trump administration has been focused on rolling back federal support for renewable energy. Why is geothermal different?

WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Jan Ellen Spiegel to discuss her article, “Can geothermal technology solve the CT electricity problem?” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Jan’s story here.

WSHU: Hello, Jan. Let’s start by explaining what geothermal energy is and why you think it’s an energy option the Trump administration somewhat supports, while rolling back support for other renewable energy development.

JES: Geothermal, in a nutshell, is the heat in the earth. When most people think of geothermal, they think of something like the geyser Old Faithful spitting out all this hot steam. Yes, that is a function that is a type of geothermal, although that is not necessarily what you need to access that heat and use it. It’s something that’s been used for decades and decades and decades in parts of the world where there’s more of it. So it’s not especially new, and it is renewable. In terms of why the Trump administration wants it, you know, an educated guess is that because it does need a certain amount of drilling, and the kind of technology that oil and gas drillers use, that it sort of fits into that area that he’s interested in supporting.

WSHU: So basically, drill, baby drill, as long as, yeah, it employs the same technology that the drillers use for fossil fuel.

JES: Yes.

WSHU: Okay, so let’s talk about what’s happening in Connecticut. You went to a development at Union Station in New Haven. What’s going on there? And is that the biggest geothermal project we have right now?

JES: Well, as far as Connecticut goes, yeah, probably it is the biggest one we have going now. But I think it’s also important for listeners to understand that when we’re talking about geothermal, it can be used for different sorts of things. Out west, where you have a lot more volcanic activity and where there’s a lot more easily accessible heat in the ground, you can really harness quite a bit of it and use it, literally, to run a power plant that produces electricity. It’s different in the East, where the geology is much older, and when you’re accessing that kind of heat, you’re just not getting as much of it or quite as hot.

WSHU: And here it’s really for heat and cooling, heat and hot water, as opposed to generating electricity, which is, as opposed to generating electricity.

JES: Yes. Of course, there’s a nexus there that people should remember if you’re using a type of energy source, like geothermal, to run your heating and cooling, which is what you do because of the way it works, then you don’t need electricity to do that, so it frees up a little more electricity on the grid. So they work hand in hand here.

WSHU: Okay, so let’s go back to the Union Station project in New Haven. What is this, and how big is the scope?

JES: Well, pieces of it are still kind of being determined. The plan at Union Station is to use geothermal for heating and cooling and hot water in the station, as opposed to whatever they were using now, there are also plans to build, at this point, to mixed income apartment buildings that would have a total of 550 or so units with some common spaces and retail down the bottom, and that also would be for heating and cooling and hot water.

WSHU: So the whole neighborhood would be, you’d use geothermal for the entire neighborhood around Union Station.

JES: Pretty much, well, it’s stuff that doesn’t exist. Now it would be, this would be new housing, and the station obviously does exist. What they call it is networked geothermal, where you can configure it in a way, where, when you are doing that drill baby drill down into the ground, instead of running all these different what they call bore holes, there’s a way to link them together underground and use different types of essentially, you’re linking together different types of needs that can work again hand in hand with each other. So everybody doesn’t need hot water at once, and everybody doesn’t need cooling at once. The heating and cooling footprint, for instance, of Union Station is going to be different from individual apartments in these still-to-be-built units.

WSHU: Now, let’s talk a little bit about the financing for this. This is a pretty expensive project. How much is it? And how’s the financing change between what the Biden administration committed to this and what’s going on now with the Trump administration?

JES: You know, the overall cost for the underground geothermal work and the retrofitting of Union Station’s heating and cooling is really just about 16.5 million now, of course, building the apartments and doing everything there. That’s a whole separate pot of money that has not been dealt with yet. The Biden administration had given the city $9.5 million. It was approved and what they call obligated at the end of the Biden term, and the Trump administration came in and held it up. There were all kinds of movements to get it back, which they finally did do, so that money is in hand and that is being used. Now they’re at a stage where they’re doing test bore holes, but they will be part of the ultimate unit; the other 7 million has to come as a cost share from the city. The city doesn’t have that, and there is a deal being negotiated with the Connecticut Green Bank to essentially provide the city with a bridge loan that the city will repay once it gets, essentially, the rebate from the federal geothermal investment tax credit. That is one of the tax credits that the Trump administration is keeping in place. He’s killed the ones for solar, he’s killed the ones for wind, he’s killed the ones for storage, but this one is still there, so they are counting on being able to recover that money and pay the Green Bank back, which I’m sure the Green Bank will appreciate.

WSHU: Okay, and going forward in Connecticut, what is the future for geothermal developments?

JES: Well, there are a couple of different categories. One is, if you are interested in doing heat pumps, which we all know about, heat pumps that are air source heat pumps, we see those big fan-like things hanging on people’s houses that use the air temperature to regulate bringing heat into a building and get it in the winter and pushing heat out of the building in the summer. Ground source heat pumps, or geothermal heat pumps, essentially do the same thing with a little bit steadier temperature, because they are steadier underground. It’s a closed well, no, yes, it is a closed loop system. Instead of, like, literally using the hot water out of the ground, they circulate something that is, you know, a closed pipe that essentially has anti-freeze in it, and it, as somebody put it, borrows the heat in the winter and it puts it back in the ground in the summer. But part of my point is that if you want to put geothermal in your own house, you could do it, and people do do it. I mean, you obviously need a little bit of land around a house to put it in. It is more expensive than air source heat pumps, but it’s more efficient than air source heat pumps. So. You’re going to spend more to save more.

But the other part of essentially where geothermal can be used in the state are some of these bigger projects now, as far as a networked geothermal like they’re trying to do at Union Station, that would really be the first one here with multiple groups of buildings universities like Yale, like UConn, some big buildings have put in geothermal, but they’re, you know, really just for one or two buildings right there that essentially have the same sort of footprint in terms of what they use, but this real diversity of the load that you see at Union Station, this is a first one in Connecticut. There have not been that many in this part of the world. There’s a small one in Framingham, Massachusetts, that Eversource actually masterminded, which has been around for a few years. And you know, what we know about that project is that this stuff does work.