Inside Climate News
Summary
Roughly 6,100 boreholes, each drilled hundreds of feet into the earth, comprise one of the largest geothermal heating and cooling networks in the world. Electricity from a nearby wind farm and a field of solar panels pumps approximately 6 million gallons of water through a closed network of pipes that distribute hot and cold water across the sprawling 410-acre campus.
Epic, whose high-efficiency heating and cooling system was highlighted this summer by the U.S. Department of Energy, is now expanding its network by adding 2,400 more boreholes with drilling that began last month.
“Once you start putting numbers to things, the scope and scale gets a little bit crazy,” Scott Brabender said during a recent tour of the campus. He’s a vice president and senior mechanical engineer with Salas O’Brien, the firm that designed much of Epic’s geothermal system and is overseeing its current buildout.
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