With its partners, Celsius Energy achieves an American first: converting a neighborhood’s gas supply to Renewable Energy*. Led by Eversource Energy, the project will develop the first utility-scale geothermal heating and cooling network in the United States. This one-mile geothermal loop will supply an entire neighborhood – 37 buildings.
*In this case, carbon-intensive gas and fuel supplies delivered to this Framingham neighborhood.
In the frame of the Massachusetts Clean Energy and Climate Plan for 2050, the Department of Public Utilities has required utility providers to demonstrate decarbonized alternative solutions, particularly for heating. In this context, Eversource Energy believed a network geothermal solution as applied to a mixed-use neighborhood to be the best alternative solution for implementation. In collaboration with the City of Framingham, a pilot installation was identified to ensure the decarbonization of heating within a neighborhood, while meeting the requirements of this plan. The chosen system must limit the use of gas – and reduce its carbon intensity – while offering at least the same comfort and financial cost as the current solution. This technological choice will enable the buildings that make up the city’s future eco-district to benefit from a year-round heating and cooling solution powered by the Earth’s energy.
A request was also made to minimize our impact to the community during drilling. Thus, one of the primary challenges in delivering the geothermal borefields was not to shut down the parking lot of the district’s community college during construction.
As a part of Eversource Energy’s pilot project, Celsius Energy implemented three separate geothermal borefields located in strategic areas of the community linked by a one-mile geothermal loop (green line in the illustration opposite). The geoenergy system connects more than thirty buildings (secondary school, fire station, shops, apartment blocks and single-family homes).
Thanks to a pyramidal design, Celsius Energy’s innovative solution made it possible to carry out the drilling work with a small footprint that enabled the parking lot to remain accessible for faculty and student use during the school year. This innovative design also shortened the construction schedule by reducing the number of boreholes as compared to traditional vertical drilling methods and enabled a 74% reduction in surface piping and related earthwork, thanks to co-located drilling., thanks to co-located drilling.
The geothermal heat pump solution was commissioned in spring 2024 and will exploit the relatively constant temperature of the subsurface and the Earth’s thermal storage capacities to provide sustainable heating to the connected buildings in the winter. During the summer, the system will extract heat from the buildings and store the thermal energy in the ground, effectively cooling them. As the majority of buildings in scope for the project did not have robust cooling equipment in place to address the heat of summer, the native cooling offered by the geoenergy system is another highly valued benefit of the solution.
Celsius Energy’s partners:
Eversource Energy is the project developer and energy provider for the City of Framingham. RH White Construction is the provider of construction management services and installer of the distribution network. Berkel & Company Contractors, Harris Exploration and Midwest Geothermal are collaboration partners for the drilling of the geothermal borefields.
For this project, Celsius Energy was also able to call on the support of CDM Smith as the engineer of record and HEET (Home Energy Efficient Team), a non-profit organization committed to promoting green energy in the United States.
Massachusetts is on the cutting edge of leading an unprecedented clean energy transition in New England, and our networked geothermal pilot exemplifies the collaboration that is essential to achieving decarbonization goals. We’re incredibly excited to commission this first-in-the-nation utility-scale networked geothermal project, which was made possible by state and local government, environmental stakeholders, and the private sector working together. Over the next two years, we look forward to closely evaluating how this technology can be cost-effectively leveraged in other communities as part of a comprehensive approach to combatting the climate crisis.
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