DOE Announces District-Scale Geothermal Energy Pilots
The five projects feature three urban/suburban communities and two rural communities that will employ a range of system sizes, technologies, and innovations.
The District-Scale Geothermal Energy Pilots initiative, formerly the Community Geothermal Heating and Cooling (CommGeo) initiative, is a first-of-its-kind funding opportunity within the Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) that focuses on empowering communities to make decisions about their energy futures, with input from those affected by those decisions.
With the community coalition approach, GTO endeavored to give voice to a range of stakeholders—not just zoning boards, public utility commissions, and other conventional decision-making bodies, but actual communities, installers, and others as well. GTO organized a Community of Practice around these projects, where representatives from the selected coalitions discuss their community engagement, design, and deployment plans with each other, fostering shared learning to further support community-centered project development and collaboration.
Through this initiative, GTO is currently supporting five communities to install geothermal heating and cooling systems (including district-scale systems often referred to as “Thermal Energy Networks”) in the second phase of the initiative. The projects were downselected from 11 projects funded in the first phase of the initiative, where coalitions selected project sites, assessed the geothermal resource and permitting needs, conducted feasibility analysis and local engagement, and identified workforce and training needs.
The five projects feature three urban/suburban communities and two rural communities that will employ a range of system sizes, technologies, and innovations—offering diverse installations that will help other communities see how they can also implement district-scale geothermal. The selected projects will be installed by coalitions offering skills and expertise in community needs, workforce, design and analysis, and installation.
The selected project locations and leads are:
Ann Arbor, MI — Lead: City of Ann Arbor ($10M)
Chicago, IL — Lead: Blacks in Green™ ($9.9M)
Framingham, MA — Lead: Home Energy Efficiency Team [HEET] ($7.8M)
Hinesburg, VT — Lead: GTI Energy ($3M)
Shawnee, OK — Lead: University of Oklahoma ($7M)
Widespread adoption of geothermal heating and cooling systems can help electrify the building sector, reduce energy costs for families, and boost grid resilience. Learn more about geothermal heating and cooling on GTO’s website.
Selection for award negotiations is not a commitment by DOE to issue an award or provide funding. Before funding is issued, DOE and the applicants will undergo a negotiation process, and DOE may cancel negotiations and rescind the selection for any reason during that time.
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