Inside Climate News
Summary
Buried beneath the front lawn of the county courthouse and town square are 132 boreholes, each 300 feet deep. Pipes connected to the bores run below the surrounding blocks, providing downtown businesses with year-round geothermal energy. The high-efficiency, fossil-fuel-free heating and cooling system owned by the town was one of the first municipal thermal networks in the country when it began operating in 2014.
For Steve Fate, the president of West Union District Energy, which oversees the system, its appeal is simple.
“It saves us money, and will continue to save us money,” Fate said, emphasizing the financial benefits of the geothermal system.
In 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy highlighted West Union as having one of the highest-performing geothermal networks among a small but growing number of similar systems in operation nationwide.
“It’s sort of a celebrity among thermal energy networks because it was constructed very early,” said Jessica Silber-Byrne, the thermal energy networks research and communications manager for the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a nonprofit organization working to eliminate the use of fossil fuels in buildings.
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