Inside Climate News
Summary
In the basement of Swarthmore College’s dining hall, a transformation is underway. As students eat lunch upstairs, beneath their feet, the school’s fossil fuel past is being replaced with its clean energy future.
Off a cavernous, buzzing space that will eventually house the plant at the heart of a new geoexchange system for heating and cooling the college, dusty old pipes, first installed more than a century ago as part of a natural gas-powered steam system, sit alongside shiny replacement pipes, which will soon carry hot and chilled water across campus.
The geoexchange system works by storing heat in the earth during the summer and extracting it in the winter. In phase one of the 12-year project, 350 800-foot deep, 6-inch wide wells, drilled into one of the school’s expansive lawns over the last year, will store the heat. Swarthmore’s system will be powered by off-site renewable energy, and they expect to begin connecting buildings later this year.
For Swarthmore, which has the space, “there isn’t a better option” for decarbonizing than a district heating geoexchange system like the one they’re building.
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