High Country News
Summary
In 1892, the people of Boise, Idaho, came up with an idea for staying warm without burning the usual coal or wood: They piped water from nearby hot springs into their own homes to heat them, as well as into the local Natatorium, an indoor swimming pool and spa.
Indigenous peoples had been using hot springs’ natural warmth for millennia, but Boise was probably the nation’s first settler-colonial city to pipe this energy directly into its homes. Today, Boise’s municipal utility employs a similar method to heat its downtown buildings
Boise is harnessing a simple, lower-temperature form of geothermal energy found relatively close to the Earth’s surface. It’s tapped elsewhere in the West, warming swimming pools and sidewalk snow-melting systems — even an alligator farm in Colorado — as well as greenhouses and a prison in Utah. The Earth’s heat can also be harnessed to create steam to turn a turbine and generate electricity, without burning dirty fossil fuels or sparking dangerous nuclear reactions. Geothermal doesn’t flag when the sun sets or the wind stops blowing, and it takes up far less space than other clean energy sources. And it won’t be exhausted until the Earth’s core is, which (hopefully) won’t happen for another several billion years.
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