Climate Good News
Around the world people are taking the initiative to mitigate climate change.
Here are some good news briefs compiled by the Climate Issue group
of the LWV of Bellingham/Whatcom.
Geothermal Is the Rare Renewable Energy
Winning Favor in Trump’s America
With roots from the oil industry and a clean profi le, geothermal is emerging as the one renewable energy the Trump administration actually likes.
Generated by tapping into the extreme heat at the center of the Earth, geothermal power is an energy unicorn: it’s renewable, produces virtually no greenhouse gas emissions and is always on.
“This is just an awesome resource that’s under our feet,” Chris Wright, head of the United States Energy Department, said in March.
With adequate government support, experts say, the burgeoning industry could take off in the United States, helped by expertise and potential investment interest from the country’s fossil fuel sector. Importantly, accessing geothermal energy involves techniques similar to drilling for oil and gas.
According to the international Energy Agency, geothermal could meet 15 percent of global demand by 2050 if the technology continues to advance and costs continue falling, Geothermal energy has also been getting bipartisan support on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures, giving the industry hope that federal dollars will follow. Much of the permitting process for these projects happens at the state level.
Carlos Araque, CEO of Quaise, a geothermal startup developing drilling technology to enable extraordinarily deep drilling to reach into hotter rock, believes this kind of enthusiasm will make a huge difference.
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“Geothermal is the rare renewable energy winning favor in Trump’s America” by Cat Cliff ord, Cipher News : https://lnkd.in/e9u8nAPR
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Washington Legislature Passed Bills to Incentivize Geothermal Energy
OLYMPIA – Legislation by Sen. Liz Lovett and Rep. Alex Ramel to further study and incentivize the development of geothermal energy sources passed the Washington State Senate and House on a unanimous vote last year.
These bills directed the Washington Geological Survey (WGS) to update mapping and compile a public database of subsurface geologic information while also creating grant programs to support geothermal exploration and individual tribal consultation.
The grants would off set costs associated with deep exploratory drilling to identify locations suitable for development. One of those areas is just south of Mt. Baker. The legislation also directs the state Department of Ecology to consult with participating tribes and to identify opportunities and risks associated with the development of geothermal resources.
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“Senate advances geothermal energy legislation” Washington Senate Democrats (.gov) https://senatedemocrats.wa.gov
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Geothermal Heat Finds a home in Littleton
Ground-source heat pumps, which tap into the stable temperatures found hundreds of feet beneath the Earth’s surface, are a super-efficient way to heat and cool homes. They’re also quite expensive to install in existing houses.
It’s hard to drill in a residential neighborhood. Try fitting a giant rig into a normal size single-family yard, and also drill boreholes in places that utility infrastructure crisscrosses underfoot. It is easier to stick to air-sourced heat pumps or conventional gas furnaces.
But, imagine if the land was cleared and bare — the economy of scale for drilling many bore holes would significantly cut costs. Once that is done, the houses could be built on top. In fact, it could make groundsource heat pumps about as cheap as traditional HVAC.
Lennar and Dandelion Energy are doing just that for 1,500 new homes in Littleton, Colorado, over the next two years. Th e goal is simple, Kathy Hannun, Dandelion’s founder and president, told Canary Media: “Can you get the up-front cost to be lower than everything else? Because then you have no reason not to do it.”
An added bonus is: eliminating the need for new gas pipelines and reducing the peak electricity demands on the power grid; subdivisions built on this model could save a bundle on utilities as well. That’s a key benefit cited in a January report from the Department of Energy, which found that widespread adoption of ground-source heat pumps, also known as geothermal heat pumps, could cut hundreds of gigawatts of peak demand and tens of billions of dollars in grid costs over the coming decades.
An Option for Whatcom County?
That study also found groundsource heat pumps could make a big dent in residential energy consumption and carbon emissions, particularly in climates where they outperform airsource heat pumps during cold winter weather.
But at the moment, the technology is underutilized … the technology is in no more than 1 percent of U.S. homes, the report found. For comparison air-source heat pumps are now in about 13 percent of U.S. homes. New construction rather than retrofit may be the answer to scaling up.
The chief barrier, once again, is the up-front expense. Dandelion has spent the past eight years working to bring down those costs through a combination of technology and business-model innovation, and has done more than 1,000 home retrofits in the U.S. Northeast, targeting homes with high heating costs, many of which use expensive fuel oil.
To break into larger volume deployments, Dandelion has shifted its focus to new construction over the past two years or so.
Lennar and Dandelion aren’t disclosing cost data for the homes they’re collaborating on in Colorado. But, Hannun said, “in a few markets, the up-front cost of geothermal today is less than conventional” heating.
That’s certainly the case in Colorado, where Gov. Jared Polis has made geothermal energy, or “the heat beneath our feet,” as he’s dubbed it in various state and regional policy initiatives, a big part of the state’s broader decarbonization strategy.
Over the past few years, the state has passed legislation creating tax credits for heat pumps, including ground-source systems, and competitive grants for geothermal energy projects. It also passed a law in 2021 that spurred Xcel Energy, the state’s largest utility, to launch a Clean Heat Plan that will provide signifi cant rebates to projects that improve energy effi ciency and help customers switch from gas to electric heating.
The government and utility incentives will also lower costs for people who aren’t buying these homes, because geothermal heat pump systems reduce the need for other utility infrastructure.
“These homes will have the lowest operating cost for HVAC possible,” Hannun said. “The homeowners will spend less than if they were using air-source heat pumps or if they were using gas. And, that will be locked in for the lifetime of that home because that ground loop is built to last.”
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“Lennar will build 1,500 new Colorado homes with geothermal heat pumps” by Jeff St. John, Canary Media: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/geothermal/heat-pumps-dandelionlennar.
