Reasons to be Cheerful
Summary
If you live in the United States, your home is likely heated by a boiler or a furnace — a little personal power plant in your basement chugging out heat just for you. There are millions upon millions of these heating units, warming individual dwellings one at a time. It’s a highly inefficient system. In fact, it isn’t really a system at all.
In most cities and suburbs, these boilers and furnaces run on natural gas, a fossil fuel often described as “clean” even though it emits carbon dioxide. The U.S. is burning a growing amount of it to stay warm. In New York City, for example, 42 percent of carbon emissions come from natural gas boilers. Finding cleaner, more efficient ways to heat our homes is a climate action imperative.
One solution may lie across the Atlantic, in the suburbs of Paris, where a vast, shared heating source snakes below the ground, pumping carbon-neutral heat from deep beneath the earth into homes — a sustainable system everyone can tap into.
A sprawling solution
In 2015, France committed to being carbon neutral by 2050. Reducing indoor heating emissions would be crucial to achieving this goal. The roadmap to get there relied, in part, on geothermal heat distributed to homes and buildings in suburban Paris through an unusual network known as district energy.
District energy systems produce hot (and sometimes cold) water at a central location, then channel that water through underground pipes to buildings, either heating or cooling them. This eliminates the need for individual boilers and reduces carbon emissions, since producing heating and cooling at a central location is more efficient than generating it one building at a time. The French plan takes this model and makes it even more sustainable by producing the heat with a green energy source: geothermal energy.
Geothermal energy draws water from deep beneath the ground, where it has been naturally heated by the earth, making it a carbon neutral energy source. “In France we know that there are mainly three big regions where there are awesome resources for geothermal,” says Alexis Goldberg, the head of the District Heating Market at ENGIE Solutions. “Île-de-France, Grand est Alsace in the east of France, and Aquitaine in the southwest of France.”
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