The Promising Renewable Energy That Democrats and Republicans Actually Agree On

From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, a conversation between producer Jenni Doering and Inside Climate News reporter Phil McKenna.

As brutal cold has gripped much of the U.S. and increased heating demands, natural gas prices have soared as much as 60 percent. But the day-to-day cost of geothermal heating is steady as a rock. 

Geothermal uses pipes and liquid (often water) to tap the Earth’s steady temperature of around 55 degrees underground, using heat pumps to extract heat from the rocks for warming and pumping it back underground for cooling.

Unlike the political divide over wind and solar renewable energy sources, there is strong bipartisan support for geothermal systems. Proponents include U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, the former CEO of a company that has invested millions in geothermal energy. 

Phil McKenna of Inside Climate News has reported extensively on geothermal energy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

JENNI DOERING: In recent months, you’ve traveled throughout the Midwest to visit several different geothermal projects. What did you see, and what were some of the highlights?

PHIL MCKENNA: I went to three sites in three days in three different states: Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota. One of the reasons I went is, there’s a lot of interest in New England in geothermal but a big concern is, how do these systems really work? I went to check out a couple that have been in—one for 20 years, one for 15 years—to talk to people there to see how they’re working. 

I went to West Union, Iowa, a very small system in a town of about 2,500 people. It’s a farm town in northeastern Iowa that uses geothermal to heat and cool about a dozen office buildings in its downtown. Then I went to St. Paul, Minnesota, to a mixed-use housing development called The Heights, that will use aquifers underground for their heating and cooling. Another one I went to was the corporate campus of Epic Systems, which is one of the largest private tech companies in the country, a medical records company that employs about 12,000 people at their campus. Across 400 acres, they heat and cool all of their buildings with a very large—likely the largest in the world—geothermal network. They have about 6,000 boreholes in the ground, which is just orders of magnitude larger than anything that utility companies are now looking at as they do their initial pilot projects.

DOERING: I want to ask you more about this plant in Wisconsin at Epic Systems. What got this started?

MCKENNA: They started 20 years ago, I think, really looking at what is the best way to heat and cool our buildings, what is the most efficient system? Prior to that, there had been some geothermal heating and cooling ground-source heat pumps. A lot of people have them in their homes—not a lot, but some, and they have for decades—and it’s just a really efficient way to heat and cool your home. 

What they realized early on is that as you scale up, as you build a larger network, you see increases in efficiency and decreases in costs. Part of that is just the usual economy of scale as you build something bigger. You get more efficient at building it, but part of it is as you add different buildings with different heating and cooling loads, the efficiency of the system overall goes up because you’re no longer having to generate new heating or new cooling. You’re able to just kind of push from one building to another, or from one room to another, that heat or that cold. 

In kind of a classic example, if you’re doing this in a residential area, you might have homes that in the wintertime are going to need a lot of heating, but if you have an ice rink in that neighborhood as well, that’s going to need a lot of cooling. If you can connect to those two in a network, you can push that heating and cooling between the two and get a much larger efficiency.

DOERING: What challenges has this large geothermal project in Wisconsin, at the Epic campus, faced?

MCKENNA: I think it’s the same for all geothermal heating and cooling networks in that the upfront cost is significant. The efficiency of the system—about 75 percent more efficient than conventional heating and cooling—means that you’re not going to be spending much on the system once it’s operating. But there is that significant hurdle of that upfront cost. 

That is a challenge now, as communities and utility companies look to deploy these systems: They know that it’s going to work well, they know that’s going to be very efficient—but you’ve still got to come up with the initial money to make the project happen.

DOERING: The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act included incentives for installing geothermal. Where do those benefits stand now with the Trump administration?

MCKENNA: It’s interesting. Incentives for wind, solar and EVs all got cut or even clawed back. But the incentives for geothermal have remained largely intact. But Framingham, Mass., which had the first utility-led geothermal heating and cooling system, at the end of the Biden administration, they were given a $9 million grant to build phase two, essentially to double the size of their thermal network. 

At the beginning of the Trump administration, that funding was really in question. No one knew if it was going to continue, if they were going to get the money. But late last year, the contracts were finalized and that project will move forward. Not only is there continued support in geothermal as this project goes forward, it will double in size at half the cost of the initial project.

DOERING: Why do you think geothermal has escaped some of the opposition that wind and solar have faced from the Trump administration?

MCKENNA: It’s very oil- and gas-adjacent to transition to drilling for geothermal. It’s a lot of the same industry, a lot of the same jobs, a lot of the same equipment. There’s strong interest in the oil and gas industry to also pursue geothermal energy. There’s a lot of talk about energy independence, and the heat beneath our feet can be tapped here in the U.S., same as oil and gas.

DOERING: What are you keeping your eye on when it comes to geothermal in the year ahead?

MCKENNA: I think in the coming year there’s going to be a continuation of these utility pilot projects. Thirteen states in recent years have passed legislation that either requires utilities to do a pilot project or incentivizes them through grants and other funding to make it easier to fund them. 

There are now 26 pilot projects led by utilities that are either in some form of development, or in the case of Framingham, have been completed. States that I’m keeping a close eye on are New York and Colorado, along with Massachusetts, which really seem to be leading on this. But even states like Texas have passed legislation. It’s a red state that you wouldn’t think would be doing a lot of clean energy development, but there’s a lot of oil and gas drilling in Texas. 

Having gone to Epic Systems and seeing such a large system—6,000 bores, compared to Framingham at about 90 bores—it seems to me like a potential mode of how these systems could scale up from what we’re seeing now by utilities as initial pilot projects that are relatively small could be going much larger. Epic’s campus employs about 12,000 people on site—really getting to the town or small city level.