How an Unlikely Coalition of Climate Activists and a Gas Utility Are Weaning a Boston Suburb Off Fossil Fuels

BOSTON—Three climate activists and three gas utility executives walk into a room.

It may sound like the start of a joke.

However, the meeting at an Eversource Energy boardroom outside Boston in December 2016 marked the beginning of an improbable relationship that is redefining what it means to be a gas utility. Though still in its infancy, the work is beginning to transform how communities across the commonwealth, the country and the world can heat and cool their homes without fossil fuels.

The odds of anything productive coming out of that discussion had seemed low. 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, according to Zeyneb Magavi, one of those three women.

Before the two groups sat down together, Bill Akley, then president of Eversource’s gas operations, was asked if he needed security and lawyers to join him and his two male colleagues in the boardroom. Akley passed on both, but 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 in a recent speech recalling the event.

Instead, Eversource ended up working with the groups who came to that meeting,  Mothers Out Front and HEET, to find and plug the biggest gas leaks in Cambridge. Natural gas is made up almost entirely of methane, a greenhouse gas so potent that leaks can flip its impact on the climate from better than burning coal to worse. 

But plugging those leaks was still a bandage on a bigger problem, Magavi said. To really address climate change, people would have to stop burning fossil fuels entirely. A climate law Massachusetts passed in 2021 effectively required as much by 2050. However, until recently, 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.  

Now HEET, working closely with Eversource and other utilities, may have found a way.

In June, Eversource completed a geothermal system in Framingham, Massachusetts, that provides heating and cooling for an entire neighborhood, including public housing residents, by tapping low-temperature thermal heat from underground wells. It was the first geothermal system ever built by a gas utility. More than that, it’s a demonstration project that could chart a new course for the industry by transitioning off gas while preserving jobs.  

On Dec. 3, Massachusetts Gov. 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.

“It’s taking root across the country, across the world,” Magavi, 51, executive director of HEET, a Boston nonprofit working to develop neighborhood-scale geothermal heating and cooling systems, said at a recent talk. “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.”

That 2016 discussion started awkwardly and might have ended just as badly. But then Magavi, who at the time was the head of the Cambridge chapter of Mothers Out Front, said something that struck a chord.

“‘I have three children and I am worried about their future,’” Magavi recalled saying. “‘I want to do something to help protect their future, because I feel it’s unethical for us not to act.’ … There was a moment of uncomfortable silence before Bill looked at us and said, ‘Well, I have three kids too.’”

The Heat Beneath Our Feet  

Long before Magavi set out to transform an industry, she renovated her home. A physicist and public health researcher, Magavi quickly realized that a ground source heat pump would not only be the most efficient way to heat and cool the home, it would also be one of the cleanest. 

Ground source heat pumps pull heat from water in pipes circulating below ground, where temperatures are a steady 55 degrees. In summer the system runs in reverse, pulling heat from the building to cool it down. They work the same way as air source heat pumps or air conditioners but are more efficient due to the steady underground temperatures they draw from. Like air source heat pumps, they run on electricity; no gas or oil burning is required.

The system’s high efficiency would translate to lower utility bills. But the upfront costs, including drilling a well several hundred feet into the earth, were prohibitively expensive. She talked to her neighbors to see if anyone else wanted to put in a similar system, which might bring down the drilling costs for everyone, but there were no takers. She reluctantly went with a high-efficiency gas heating system instead.

Then, roughly a decade later, when HEET and others started working with utilities to plug leaks, she wondered if the gas companies could transition to providing geothermal heating and cooling instead.

What she had in mind wasn’t the high-temperature geothermal systems like one might find in Iceland that produce steam to generate electricity, but the ground source heat pump setup like she once considered for her own home.

The concept checked a lot of boxes. Gas companies make money not by selling gas but by building capital-intensive projects—pipeline networks that run under city streets delivering gas to every business and home—and then charging ratepayers a monthly fee over a period of many years.

What if a gas company built a network of pipes connected to ground source heat pumps and wells, and sold thermal heat instead? The company could still make money and keep its workforce employed. Customers would be able to heat—and cool—their homes with a highly efficient and climate-friendly source, without having to shoulder the high upfront costs.

Looking back on the history of gas companies, and their evolution over time, the idea wasn’t as crazy as it might seem, Magavi said.

“They were originally gas-lighting companies,” she said. “They were having some challenge in that business model and switched to being heating and cooking companies, delivering thermal energy rather than light.”

Another pivot they made was changing what they piped, from coal gas, a hydrogen-rich gas derived from coal and particularly prone to explosions, to natural gas.

“The switch to natural gas was in line with the mandate for safety and affordability,” Magavi said. Focusing on geothermal would be “yet another evolution of meeting the customer needs of affordability and safety.”

Still, there were challenges. Magavi, who is 5 feet, 1 inch, and her mostly female colleagues were trying to transform an industry dominated by much taller men.

Yet when HEET proposed it to Akley and other gas company executives in late 2017, there were lots of questions but few blank stares. By working together to reduce gas leaks, the climate advocates and gas executives had developed a certain level of trust.

Earlier that year, Magavi spent a summer measuring leaks, often with 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 Columbia Gas of Massachusetts, a utility later acquired by Eversource, jointly developed a plan to address leaks from some of the largest emitters 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.”

— Zeyneb Magavi, executive director of HEET

The gas executives were going to fly in for the meeting from a separate engagement in Ohio the day before. However, their flight was canceled due to a storm.

“They were so worried about not showing up for us, because we worked so hard, that they rented a car, and the four of them drove through the night and arrived with 10 minutes to spare at the DPU, rumpled in the suits from yesterday, talking about a rainbow they’d seen at dawn, hyper caffeinated, and jointly testified with us,” Magavi said.

“There were these repeated moments where generosity was met with reciprocity, and it built trust,” she said. It was a way of relationship building she learned from her parents growing up in Hanover, Massachusetts.

“It’s just how things were done,” said Magavi, now a guest lecturer for Harvard University’s sustainability leadership program and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.

HEET and other advocacy groups were also meeting with state policymakers to redefine what it means to be a gas utility in Massachusetts. They sought a change in rules that would give gas utilities, which were only allowed to offer gas service, the 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?’”

Creem 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. Healey signed the geothermal measures into law at a ceremony earlier this month.

They were part of a larger clean energy bill that focused on permitting for the electric grid. In her remarks at the signing, Healey didn’t mention geothermal but gave a nod to its potential.

“It also fosters innovation and a culture where new ideas can flourish,” Healey said of the new climate law, adding that it “will forge a path for the rest of the nation to follow.”

Red, Blue 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: neither red nor blue.

While Eversource was the first gas utility to build a networked geothermal heating and cooling system, a near-identical low temperature, interconnected heat-pump system was built nearly two decades earlier at Colorado Mesa University. Mesa County in western Colorado, where the university is located, voted roughly 2-1 for President-elect Donald Trump in each of the past three presidential elections. 

Colorado Mesa’s geothermal system, which started with just three buildings and has grown steadily over the years, has saved the school more than $15 million in fuel costs since 2008, according to Cary Smith, a former oil and gas developer who designed the system.

Smith, who has advised HEET on geothermal, said there’s no reason similar systems wouldn’t work on the East Coast.

“The laws of physics are the same here as they are in Boston,” Smith said.

More than 20 pilot projects are currently proposed nationwide, including two underway in Massachusetts—one in Lowell, the other in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood—by gas company National Grid.

The Utility Networked Geothermal Collaborative, a group of gas utilities that collectively serve roughly half of all gas customers in North America, holds quarterly meetings to share what they have learned.

Holly Braun, business development manager for NW Natural, a gas company serving Oregon and southwest Washington state, co-founded the group in 2022. Braun said a big part of the technology’s appeal for her company is the pathway it could provide to meet a 2050 decarbonization goal.

Braun said she’s cautiously optimistic about the technology’s potential but still has a lot of questions about its cost, both for the company and for ratepayers. NW Natural is planning a pilot project in Washington state, Braun said.

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.

Bruno said one of the biggest costs for the initial project was retrofitting and weatherizing the often 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 Dec. 11. 

“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.”

“Take the Baton and Run With It”

The head of the agency that approved the grant gave what will likely be her last public address for the U.S. Department of Energy at a renewable energy conference in Washington, D.C. Jennifer Granholm’s Dec. 5 speech was in part a victory lap, highlighting Biden administration achievements in clean energy development, and partly a message of hope that such advances would continue.

There was also a palpable sense of despair that all the agency had set in motion in the past four years might quickly come to an end. Trump has pledged to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement for the second time, has mocked wind energy and promises to “drill, baby, drill” for further expansions of oil and gas.

At the end of her talk, Granholm picked up a thin, metal water bottle.

“This transition is moving forward, with or without a president in the White House that is a clean energy advocate,” Granholm said. “Let’s just pretend this is a baton, and I’m passing it to you all. I hope you are willing to take the baton and run with it.”

Magavi, who had been part of a workshop hosted by the Energy Department on ground source heat pumps earlier in the day, rose from her seat as the audience gave Granholm a standing ovation. 

In January, Magavi plans to fly to Pakistan. There she will meet with gas utility executives interested in building networked geothermal heating and cooling systems in the 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, IFC’s regional vice president for the Middle East, Central Asia, Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan, said of geothermal’s low operating costs once the systems are built.  

Cheikhrouhou added that constructing 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.”

When Magavi departs from Boston Logan International Airport for her trip to Pakistan, she will pass near an exhibit celebrating four centuries of innovation, “from Massachusetts to the world.” Displays along a terminal wall opposite a Starbucks and Wahlburgers restaurant highlight a range of inventions developed in the state, from the Apollo moon landing guidance system and the microwave to the chocolate chip cookie.

Magavi would love to see gas utility geothermal heating and cooling in a similar exhibit someday.

“Massachusetts is incredibly fertile ground because people like ideas in Massachusetts, and there’s a lot of people who are excited and willing to participate,” she said.

But she’s quick to note that many of the key innovations in ground source heat pumps that make networked geothermal possible were developed in Oklahoma.

“The non-emitting part is a different priority for different people,” she said, “but local energy that is secure and non-ending, everyone thinks that’s cool.”