Nature
Summary
The half-a-dozen nineteenth-century commercial buildings huddled beside the Hudson River that make up an arts centre in Troy, New York, are destined for a distinctly twenty-first-century energy makeover. The same goes for an apartment building across the street and a department store-turned-technology hub a few blocks away.
The plan — hatched by Troy’s economic-development office to revitalize the downtown area and now driven by regional utility company National Grid — is to combine the buildings’ heating and cooling systems in a single high-efficiency, low-carbon network. The hope is that more buildings will join the scheme before the thermal network begins operating in 2027. Ultimately, it might wean all of the Central Troy Historic District off natural gas.
The thermal energy networks (TENs) that tap geothermal resources in this way are radically changing the image of a technology that utility companies had previously dismissed as prohibitively expensive. “Geothermal would be written off on day one,” says Eric Bosworth, an independent energy consultant in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. “Now there are examples of successful projects all over the place.”
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