What is Networked Geothermal?
Networked geothermal systems serve multiple buildings in a community with clean heating and cooling year-round. They are utility-scale systems that use wells, piping and pumps to pull the earth’s heat out of the ground to warm buildings in winter and pump heat from buildings back into the ground to cool them in summer.
Advantages of Networked Geothermal
- Reasonable operating costs for residents and businesses
- Provides community-level solutions
- Leverages gas utility expertise and equipment in infrastructure development and maintenance
- Helps meet increasing demand for clean energy with less burden on our electric grid
What is the Framingham Project?
Networked geothermal is still a new approach to heating and cooling. Eversource is currently installing the nation’s first network in Framingham, Massachusetts, connecting 36 commercial and residential buildings (125 customers) and a well field to a thermal loop.
- Learn more about Eversource's Framingham project
- "A gas utility and climate advocates in Framingham offer a vision for the future: cleaner, cheaper energy," The Boston Globe, June 4, 2024.
How MassCEC Is Advancing Networked Geothermal Technology
We're helping to answer questions about the application of networked geothermal technology by supporting critical studies and other activities.
- Learning everything possible from the Framingham project to make future projects perform better, have lower costs, and be implemented more easily by
- Conducting detailed analyses of customer demand and usage of the public loop, underground thermal resource availability and balance, and how the distribution system couples the two
- Supporting HEET's "Learning from the Ground Up" research initiative
- Funding Kickstart Massachusetts, a program that supports municipalities and local institutions that want to explore opportunities to use networked geothermal
- Commissioning a study of the potential for networked geothermal across the state