Episode 34: GeoMicroDistrict: an alternative future for Natural Gas - HEET
Dave Karlsgodt 0:00
Welcome to the campus energy and sustainability podcast. In each episode, we'll talk with leading campus professionals, thought leaders, engineers and innovators addressing the unique challenges and opportunities facing higher ed and corporate campuses. Our discussions will range from energy conservation and efficiency to planning and finance, from building science to social science, from energy systems to food systems. We hope you're ready to learn, share and ultimately accelerate your institution toward solutions. I'm your host, Dave Karlsgodt. I'm a director of energy and utility advisory services at Brailsford & Dunlavey..
Zeyneb Magavi 0:33
...We did have our first meeting with Eversource Gas to discuss this challenge. And we proposed immediately that we seek solutions together that we find some common ground and we did that centered around our children. We basically walked into a corporate boardroom with the president of the gas company and sat down and said, I have three children and I'm concerned about their future. And we got a very generous, thoughtful reply back...
Audrey Schulman 1:03
...the gas system as a tree with its branches spread out across the state. Then if you want to bring a tree down, you don't, especially if it's in a dense area, you don't cut it off at the trunk and call out timber that would result in disaster. But instead you prune it back starting at the edges.
Dave Karlsgodt 1:24
In this episode, I talk with Zainab Magavi and Audrey Schulman, the co-executive directors of the Home Energy Efficiency team or HEET. Both women entered the climate change fight as mothers concerned about the future for their children. We begin with a history of their work on fixing super emitting natural gas leaks in their neighborhood and across the state of Massachusetts. They share the story of building relationships with natural gas utility executives in order to make meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. From there we talked through their next major challenge: What is the role of a natural gas system in a world that needs to eliminate the use of fossil fuel? We discuss HEET's role and developing the GeoMircroDistrict and neighborhood scale renewable energy network for heating and cooling buildings. We discussed the technology, but also how the alternative business model offers a cost effective path forward for our utility companies and their workers as we replace our aging natural gas infrastructure. Regular listeners will hear echoes of Episode 25 when we talked with Carleton College about a similar approach on their campus. I really enjoyed talking with these smart, innovative and passionate leaders who are combining the power of motherhood, science and creativity to map out a better world for all of us. I hope you enjoy this interview, recorded July 1 2020. Well, Zeyneb and Audrey, it's great to have you on the show today.
Audrey Schulman 2:46
Thank you. We're delighted to be here.
Zeyneb Magavi 2:48
Thank you so much, David. I'm really happy to be here to talk.
Dave Karlsgodt 2:51 Great. Well, we have a lot of ground to cover today. Let's start with some personal background and then we can get into the work you're doing at HEET where you are both the co-executive directors, if I have your titles right, and we'll see where we go from there. Zeyneb, let's start with you. I know you and I met a few years back, at Leith Sharp's Harvard sustainability leadership course. And I distinctly remember you presenting in that coveted right after lunch slot. I think I was a bit sleepy and maybe a bit skeptical about what you were going to present on. And you started talking something about activist moms and natural gas leaks, which which caught my interest. And then by the end, I think I was standing, shaking off my food coma in a standing ovation at the end of your presentation. So I know since that presentation, your story's evolved a little bit, but I'd like to give our listeners a little bit of that history. And then I know since then, I've learned that Audrey was actually a part of that story. So maybe you can pass the baton to her when it makes sense. So can you start just by introducing yourself and we'll go from there.
Zeyneb Magavi 3:47
Absolutely. So I'm here today with you as a co-executive director of HEET. My name is Zeyneb Magavi but this all began quite a few years ago and it began because I'm a mother. I have three children. And I used to work in global health and public health and I was concerned about their exposures in terms of health in the home, you know, the usual toxins and the baby bottle questions and became fairly active in making sure that they were safe as a mother out of care to them, but became increasingly concerned that I couldn't keep them safe from climate change. And that that was you know, the mega problem, the mega threat to their future and I had a neighbor, Audrey, who also had two kids and was concerned about this. Over the years, we each kind of found our own path towards doing something about it, to protect our kids. I got involved in the gas leaks world, very unplanned and not not on my life to-do list by getting involved in Mothers Out Front, which is a grassroots organization that began here in Cambridge, in Massachusetts, and is now national, of mothers, grandmothers and allies, mobilizing for a livable climate from their kids across all boundaries, just out of love and protection for the children of this world. And so, we took on the question of gas leaks, because there had been recent publications showing the enormous amount of methane and how powerful that was as a climate change accelerator being leaked by the from the gas leaks in the streets. Audrey, my, my previous neighbor was already involved in gas leaks at that point. And so we reconnected this time sharing the work, and it's been it's been quite a ride since. I want to just pass the conversation to Audrey, for her to tell that background story of how she became involved.
Audrey Schulman 3:47
Thank you. So I'm Audrey Schulman. I'm that other co-executive director. And I also started because of my children. I'd always been worried about climate change, but it seemed far in the future until I gave birth to my first child in the year 2000. And him being born in 2000 made it all too easy to be able to predict how old he would be when each of the scientific predictions became true in you know, 2030 when he'd be 30, in 2050, when he'd be 50, etc. And it became very personal to me because of this, it became a threat like I, you know, was supposed to save for his college. But I wasn't supposed to do something to ensure that he had a livable planet to be on. So I joined with a group of neighbors to help to start HEET, which started off as teaching energy efficiency skills, some tasks to different neighbors in, you know homes, so they'd be able to do that work in their own home. But after a while, you know, we've always been innovative and into learning and always been hungry to get more and more emissions now. So we kept iterating and getting bigger and bigger chunks of emissions until we discovered natural gas, which is the mother lode of emissions because it is such a powerful greenhouse gas. So if I understand it correctly, you started on, you started on energy efficiency, but then got into the leaks, because the leaks themselves are, what 28 times more powerful than in a short term period. Is that right? I think it's it's over 80 times more powerful over the first 20 years in which it's released.
Zeyneb Magavi 7:56
According to IPCC, it's 84 to 86 times carbon dioxide in the first 20 years in the atmosphere on burning natural gas or nothing.
Dave Karlsgodt 8:06
Got it? So that's that's some leverage right there. So you started on the leaks? And then tell us how did you go after the leaks? What was that process?
Audrey Schulman 8:15
So there's over, There's an enormous number of guests leaks in Massachusetts generally, something over 16,000 unrepaired leaks as reported by the utilities each year. And there's no way that we can get them to fix them all now, but there was a great scientific study by Boston University showing that just 7% of all the gas leaks out there, were basically gushing out gas way faster than all the others and emitted fully half of all the gas by volume. So as soon as we heard that we thought, right, let's fix those first. That's the fastest least expensive method to cut the emissions. Zeyneb Do you want to take the next step?
Zeyneb Magavi 9:04
Well backing up for a minute a part of part of how we got the leverage to fix those gas leaks first was started with the Mothers Out Front Cambridge team that I had joined, we had the leak maps that Audrey had created on Google and made public. And we decided to make this invisible problem visible. But that was the the challenge. And so we spent a weekend in May across Cambridge, putting signs on every single gas leak to really bring the problem into people's streets and neighborhoods near their homes and businesses and schools. And it had an enormous amount of impact without a large amount of attention. And the ideas spread and other teams of Mothers Out Front and other climate activists began, quote tagging the gas leaks in towns across the state. They were forums that spread the information about the impact on climate and also on trees, on your pocketbook, because we're paying for the lost gas on this hazard of explosive gas leaking in your neighborhood. And that built a movement. And with that movement, the scientific finding of you know, just a handful of the leaks were leaking half of the methane, it became a policy opportunity. And within months of the publication of that finding, we were able to pass a law in Massachusetts that required gas utilities to prioritize the repair of those environmentally significant leaks.
Dave Karlsgodt 10:44
So basically, you use like a piece of paper and a stapler and next to the last kitten sign you had a there's a gas leak here, maybe you should care about it. And the next thing you know you've changed state law. So maybe a little over simplification.
Zeyneb Magavi 10:55
It's a little oversimplification because we did make them waterproof and multicolor, but okay, fair enough. Yes, you got it.
Audrey Schulman 11:04
And also, you know, saying it very carefully checked with all the city councilors and the fire chief, etc, beforehand about the messaging to make sure that you know that everybody was on board. And that's one of the many things we do, which is to create to check with everybody to make sure that we are finding common ground rather than alienating people.
Dave Karlsgodt 11:29
Well there's, so talk about that. How did the gas companies respond to this because I can't imagine in one hand, they don't want to leak gas because it's their product, but at the same time, having a bunch of mothers putting signs up about their leaks is probably not very...
Zeyneb Magavi 11:29
Well, we did go out and check with everybody we had access to, like Audrey just mentioned, every city councilor, every relevant person in the town before tagging these leaks. The one group we didn't have access to was Eversource Gas, the company that sort of provides gas in this area. We did reach out to them. But we didn't get a fast reply or meeting immediately. In retrospect, we now understand that the tagging of the leaks was really a direct gut punch to the utilities that they have a lot of concern for their public image that this was a really serious thing for them.
Audrey Schulman 12:26
Especially when done by moms and little kids. It's like the publicity was so darn cute.
Zeyneb Magavi 12:32
Yes, Yes, we did have the cutest publicity ever. So in in time, after this law was passed, and remember the speed between these actions and getting the law passed was extraordinary, just a few months. And within a couple of months after that, after a number of letters from grandmothers in Cambridge, we did have our first meeting with Eversource Gas to discuss this challenge. And we proposed immediately that we seek solutions together that we find some common ground. And we did that centered around our children. We basically walked into a corporate boardroom with the president of a gas company and sat down and said, well, we introduced this podcast for I have three children, and I'm concerned about their future. And we got a very generous, thoughtful reply back where the president said I have three children too, and I care about their future too. And so we immediately found that common ground and began to attempt to find a way to work together towards a solution. And I'm not gonna say that was an easy thing for either side. But in the end, we were able to move forward with a study to learn how to find those largest leaks most cost effectively and efficiently.
Audrey Schulman 13:55
Because the utilities up until then had always had to worry only about Safety and not emissions. So they they didn't have an easy method of like figuring out which of the many leaks were the super emitting ones.
Dave Karlsgodt 14:09
So super emitting in the sense of climate change is not the same as going to blow up your neighborhood necessarily?
Audrey Schulman 14:14
Yes, gas has to build up in a contained area in order to become explosive, so potentially explosive. So if it's, you know, you got a gas leak out in the middle of the street, it can emit all at once, it's not going to build up into an explosive amount. And the utilities up until now did not have to repair those leaks.
Dave Karlsgodt 14:37
Got it.
Zeyneb Magavi 14:38
Oh, guess utilities are, you know, very reasonably, very slow to change cautious entities and fairly risk averse. So, the shift in thinking from this focus on explosion hazard to explosion hazard and climate hazard was fairly profound. For them, and it took, I would say more than a year of conversations and engagement to really for that to sink in as a as an actionable item for them. The opportunity however, we could not, we could not do this kind of research or move forward in identifying these leaks with out them however, and we didn't have, for example, gas utility trucks or training or compressors. So, their willingness to uh, allow us to go out with the trucks and do this research, HEET was the entity funding the research, I was a research lead. And this is where Audrey and I began to work together more intensely than before. And I had the opportunity to go out on the truck with the gas utility guys and spend hours and hours in the hot sun day after day for a whole summer and I learned so much from them in so many different ways.
Dave Karlsgodt 16:02
So if I understand it correctly, based on what you told me in the first presentation, HEET actually develop some new ways of detecting leaks like this, because like you said the gas company hadn't they didn't have equipment to detect them in this smaller quantity or... tell me more about that.
Audrey Schulman 16:18
It's not that they didn't, they didn't, they have devices to be able to find where the gas leaks are, and to figure out whether it's potentially to the level of explosion, but they didn't have any method with which to figure out which ones were emitting the most amount of gas. So what we did is we tried out a variety of methods that might help them identify the biggest gas leaks so they could get fixed and Zeyneb did this whole all the research and came up with a variety of different methods and we showed how effective each one was. The winning one was created by Bob Ackley who's of Gas Safety Inc., or suggested by him, which is basically the concept that a big gas leak underneath the ground is going to push gas out further and further and further through the ground. And so that by measuring, basically the area, the surface area of gas saturated soil over a leak is a great proxy for how much gas is being emitted.
Dave Karlsgodt 17:25
Very cool.
Audrey Schulman 17:26
And so if it's over 2000, square foot,
Zeyneb Magavi 17:30
I mean, that threshold is still evolving, but we did so what we did is we took the same kind of sensing talking to everyone every expert and collecting ideas and then we picked out what we thought were the five or six most relevant and tested all of them against a very labor intensive, scientifically correct method that would never actually work in the field, but the chamber method and we also in the process, there was a gap of and we did collectively invent something called the flux bar, which was, and still is a direct measurement at the time of repair. And so that became also part of our agreement with the gas companies at the end of this research as to how we would move forward together, we call that the shared action plan. And we basically negotiated with them, okay, we have this shared knowledge that we've created together this data that we are not disputing. So we're from that ground. How are we going to best move forward? And we did a large summit at MIT with 300 people, including gas utility executives and climate activists.
Audrey Schulman 18:40
The presidents of the three big gas companies in the in Massachusetts,
Dave Karlsgodt 18:44
Eversource, and remind me who those are?
Audrey Schulman 18:47
And Columbia Gas and National Grid.
Dave Karlsgodt 18:49
Okay.
Zeyneb Magavi 18:50
And also their their largest opponents, including folks who, you know, had laid down and gas pipelines etc. We're all in the room together and there were no fistfights, which was fabulous. And we also announced this shared action plan which agreed to the leak extent method that we'd found to be most cost effective and efficient at identification, agreed to heat verifying and reassessing together with utilities over the coming years, and agreed to using this flux bar as a secondary verification method.
Audrey Schulman 19:27
And, and transparency and, you know, data transparency, so that everybody could see the results.
Zeyneb Magavi 19:35
And one of maybe the most amazing things was after this, we submitted this shared action plan to our Department of Public Utility together with utilities. And in time at a utility and Department of Public Utility pace, it has become regulation in the state of Massachusetts. But even before it was enacted, as regulation the utilities begin doing it in the streets. And so that agreement that has no no lawyers no, no money, nope. It held even without regulation or requirement. And now it is actually Massachusetts law.
Dave Karlsgodt 20:19
Basically, you gave them a different way of running their business. That was I would imagine cut paid for itself, right? I mean, if they can stop the leaking gas, especially the big leaks, it actually costs more and gas lost or lost revenue than it would in the past to deal with it.
Audrey Schulman 20:34
But with utilities, they get to pass the cost of the lost gas onto consumers.
Dave Karlsgodt 20:39
So it's kind of a wash either way.
Audrey Schulman 20:40
Right. But for consumers, it is fast ROI.
Zeyneb Magavi 20:44
It is cost effective. Yes. Utilities don't have the strong incentive to do that. But yes.
Dave Karlsgodt 20:51
Got it. Yeah, we should do a different podcast on how utility business models work, because that's a topic unto itself, but..
Audrey Schulman 20:57
Oh my goodness, yes.
Dave Karlsgodt 20:58
Not limited to gas company. But well, okay, well, so. So we start with a last kitty poster that actually talks about gas leaks, and then it turns into state law with the support of the gas companies. So, so far, so good. Where do you go from here? You fix the gas leaks? No, we're not done.
Zeyneb Magavi 21:17
We, you would think we were done. But we were definitely not done.
Audrey Schulman 21:22
From from this work, we'd created real relationships with the presidents of those three different gas companies that are the, you know, have 95% of the gas customers in the state. And we figured for the first time that we had the opportunity to do something really big.
Zeyneb Magavi 21:40
Well, also, also we created real relationships with the workers on the trucks.
Audrey Schulman 21:45
Yep. And regulators and the press. And, you know, we had an opportunity here. And so one of the people that we work with is Professor Nathan Phillips from BU. He's a tree physiologist. And he said, if you think of the gas system, as a tree with its branches spread out across the state, then if you want to bring a tree down, you don't, especially if it's in a dense area, you don't cut it off at the trunk and call out timber that would result in disaster. But instead you prune it back starting at the edges and bring it down in stages. So we've looked at the, in Massachusetts, the utilities are currently replacing about 25% of the gas pipes underneath the street. And so I did an analysis of that and found how much they would be spending just at the current rate per mile times the number of miles left to do with none of the money going back to the investor or any sort of escalator and cost it is over $9 billion, which is worth which is more money than the current system in the ground is worth in its depreciated state. And we thought that's a ridiculous thing to be spending money on because we have a emissions mandate in this state to reduce our emissions 80% by 2050. These gas pipes will not be used for their lifetime, how long they should be used. And also given the current rate at which we're paying back these for these pipes that the customers are paying back the money for these new pipes, these new fossil fuel infrastructure, we will not pay it off for 100 years. So that means my you know, our children and our grandchildren will be paying for fossil fuel infrastructure that they know they will not use. And it's just crazy. So Zeyneb, go ahead.
Zeyneb Magavi 23:50
We, well, so we, we went into the next stage of this work with a set of design parameters that had come out of all of these interactions across the whole ecosystem, and it included a care for the workers future, it included a question of safety. We, we had an enormously horrifying event in Massachusetts where 8000 homes lost their gas from a mistake that resulted in the death of a young man and 71 simultaneous house fires. And we wanted a solution that got us to our climate goals. And we understood the risk of financial collapse the question of a utility, death spiral and stranded assets that we were creating as we dug gas pipe into the ground here in Massachusetts. And we also understood that the climate was changing, that we needed resilience, reliability, adaptability, and that we wanted an equitable transition that if we took out the gas pipe and relied on individual business owners and homeowners to do a individual transition with say, air source heat pumps or ground source heat pumps that the cost currently was was high. And that was a burden that couldn't be borne by the low income or most vulnerable. And so, we began to design a solution that met each of these parameters. And the resulting proposal was what we call the GeoMicroDistrict. And that is that you take out a segment of aging leaking, crumbling, I would say gas pipe on a say branch or rung of that tree that Audrey described. So a segment that isn't relied on for other portions of the system. And you replace that with more pipe in the ground in fact, the same pipe HDPE plastic and you put it in the same gas right of way in the street with the same company in the same workers. It's just that you put in a pipe that is moving water at the temperature of the ground ambient temperature water in a leak. And you connect that loop by service lines to each home or business and to an array of geothermal boreholes in the street. And the loop delivers an ambient temperature water to heat pumps in each building or customer, which then can pull off heat or cool as needed for that building. And the temperature of that water is maintained by three different energy sources. The first is simply a kind of energy sharing between buildings. So in many locations, some buildings are heating while some are cooling and so that balancing of energy between them can cover a surprisingly high percentage of energy needs. In one case study 40% is covered by that energy sharing.
Audrey Schulman 27:12
And that was like a VRF basically for instead of for building, it's a VRF for an entire street.
Zeyneb Magavi 27:19
The second source of energy is from the boreholes and those bore holes designed correctly, can provide what's called borehole thermal energy storage, basically taking the heat during the summer into the ground and returning it back to the customers in the winter. Balancing that thermal energy needs over space and time. And with a utility managing it the utility becomes a thermal energy management utility, providing that that management over space and time and the third source of energy is a backup which in the beginning in those first segments would be most needed. But as you begin to install more and more segments interconnecting and backing the gas system up, you have more and more resilience and efficiency as one streets excess cooling can cover another streets excess heating needs, and you get a more and more efficient system as you grow it, which is a beautiful direction to go.
Dave Karlsgodt 28:29
So yeah, instead of building more infrastructure that is going to be stranded assets, you build a more resilient system every section you add. One question, though, you still are adding at least in the early stages, I guess, in cases like in the middle of the winter, is there still supplemental heat?
Audrey Schulman 28:44
Yeah, right.
Dave Karlsgodt 28:45
Or is..
Audrey Schulman 28:46
Our idea is as you grow an entire district, you know, because each of these streets segments interconnect like Lego blocks, so that as you grow out that entire district of district heating and cooling, then you can, you can throw you can use biogas, which is sort of the level at which biogas can be used because we don't have enough of it to replace all of the fracked gas we have in our system currently.
Zeyneb Magavi 29:15
I would answer that slightly differently. The piloting of this system will give us real data as to whether that backup is needed, but we of course, are designing a supplemental backup heat into the system for the initial installations.
Audrey Schulman 29:35
As a sort of security blanket for people.
Zeyneb Magavi 29:37
We do have a case study in a campus in Colorado with a similar temperature range where they have not fired their gas backup for 11 years. So, we are optimistic that the backup is simply a security blanket.
Audrey Schulman 29:54
And and as an additional benefit, the you know, like air source heat pumps will get what you know a CRP a coefficient of performance of about two, which means that for every one unit of energy you put into the system, you can actually move two units of heating or cooling into or out of a building, right. But ground source heat pump will get more like a COP of around four, so twice as good. And then, you know, once you add that shared loop, that networked geothermal system to do that load canceling and sharing, then you're talking to COP of maybe six to eight. So that means that the electric grid is not going to be as strained for moving all of our buildings to electricity for heating, it will allow the transformation to this new clean economy to happen even faster.
Zeyneb Magavi 30:48
I just want to add that once you've created this thermal grid, you have a whole whole different energy system and the thermal grid itself can balance that electric grid providing not just peak cutting and load leveling, but also thermal energy storage, which is one of the key challenges to going entirely renewable energy so your your wind energy at night that you don't have a use for it can be dumped into the earth through this renewable thermal grid. And the earth is basically our cheapest long term energy storage available. So by building this system, we've also created an enormous energy storage system.
Audrey Schulman 31:36
Thermal energy storage, right? Yes, the electricity would be dumped in as you know as as heat.
Zeyneb Magavi 31:42
And and the flexibility of a thermal grid is enormous with a utility management because as our heating and cooling climates shift with climate change, which is an enormous challenge to any kind of energy system design, we can attach, bring on to the grid, thermal sources and sinks as needed. Even you know, doing fun and exciting things like dumping cool into a river that restores the temperature to its pre climate change temperature, ensuring the trout survive, or other exciting, fun thermal energy management tactics that are just out of reach without this kind of thermal utility.
Dave Karlsgodt 32:30
No, that's, that's excellent. So we've done a lot of work on campuses looking at this. So I'm familiar with it. We In fact, we did a podcast not too long ago. I think it's last fall with Carleton College where they've gone through this process. One of the challenges we run into though, is this idea of, you're essentially switching from paying for fuel at to paying more for capital costs and I in this case, this is a little different because you're basically talking about avoiding the capital costs of building all of the prices pipeline, which is probably one of the more expensive pieces as you rip up streets and start putting the pipeline in. I imagine, though, that this system would also require putting in all the equipment in at the building's themselves. But you're talking about the utility company running this. So can you tell me a little more about the kind of the business model aspects of this? Because I think that's fairly brilliant, you know, what...
Audrey Schulman 33:22
This couldn't be better for utility because what utilities, how they function is they do very expensive upfront, you know, infrastructure costs, and they pay get those costs paid back through energy bills over decades across all the customers. And that's one of the reasons why we all have gas and electricity and water. I mean, we don't all dig our own water wells, right. And in this way, the system can be regulated also to make sure that it's fair for everybody, but it spreads the costs out across all people rather than just having those with high end. from being able to move to a cleaner, safer fuel, when they want.
Zeyneb Magavi 34:05
Regarding campuses, the utility has built into his business model desire to put in infrastructure as Audrey said, and can therefore greatly reduce the cost to a campus by partnering in this kind of approach. And the utility could provide the thermal loops thereby extending its customer base. The campus can simply invest in the heat pump infrastructure needed within the buildings to pull the temperature off. In again, some initial case studies, campuses and they're the perfect case study, of course, are having payback on a system like this even with paying for the installed loop in less than 10 years because you got these efficiencies, you can't get any other way with the reduction of infrastructure needed by load sharing and low canceling. And with the reduction in electricity costs from the cooling, as well as water cost reductions from reduction of cooling tower use, which matters more in some locations than others, but the kind of system impacts in terms of cost reduction, it appears to be quite large, and we can't wait to get more cases in and have kind of a consistent prediction.
Dave Karlsgodt 35:35
Let me let me ask or make a comment on the cooling towers first. So just for the listeners that may not be aware of how campus scale in or even large buildings have for air conditioning, they're not running air units like you would have in your house they're running. They have giant concrete bunker looking things like something straight out of Dharma initiative, I always think, where they're running water down and it's evaporative cooling, so you're losing the heat out of the water as it evaporates, which means you lose a lot of water, right? And you're usually running a lot of places or running potable water through those systems, which means you're cleaning this water up, only to evaporate it to the sky so you can get rid of the heat. In some cases, people can use non potable water. But so yeah, so in this case, tell me how this works differently. Just I mean, I know but I'll let you answer.
Audrey Schulman 36:19
So you can provide cooling because you've you've for instance, during the winter, you're been sucking all the heat off of that shared loop of water, right to heat all the buildings. And so you've taken all the cooling leftover and stored it in the bore holes in the ground. And then when the summer hits, and you need that cooling, you pull it out of the boreholes, you can use some cooling towers as needed. But you can do it if you need it at night when they it temperature is cooler, thus making it a much more efficient process.
Dave Karlsgodt 36:55
And then in the end, there's no water loss in the pipes. Right?
Zeyneb Magavi 36:59
Right. No water loss. With pipes, and I would just point out that cooling by the type will usually install homes with a compressor electric or cooling by cooling tower. Neither is as efficient a technology as an air, ground source technology. And heat pump technology basically uses, you know, one unit of electricity and produces multiple units of cooling energy. So by creating this system, you're providing the optimal system to keep the heat pumps most efficient. And in fact, one engineer says this shared loop makes the heat pumps happy, which I think is a lovely idea. And so you get this optimal efficiency from heat pumps. And there's nothing more efficient than that.
Audrey Schulman 37:50
Yeah, most you know, like the air will fluctuate enormously in temperature from negative five up to 105. Whereas the ground is always the same temperature, and it's much closer, it's like, you know, somewhere in the 50s, it's much closer to the temperature you want in your home. So it's way easier to pull that the energy you need out way more efficient.
Dave Karlsgodt 38:13
In both heating and cooling, you're not going to freeze the ground or heat up the ground over time
Audrey Schulman 38:17
You create a balance. As much heating, as you put in is the amount of cooling you take out.
Zeyneb Magavi 38:22
That case study in Colorado, I keep talking about Carrie Smith of the Gray Edge Group built that over a decade ago, and about a year into our effort. We were really thrilled to discover this and have been collaborating with them since.
Dave Karlsgodt 38:37
Okay, well, so tell me more about the actual pilot project you're working on now because my understanding is you're doing this you have real pipes and real ground and real houses hooked up to a real system. But what's the scale and what's that progression look like?
Zeyneb Magavi 38:51
There are some initial installs that are very similar to this the pilot. That we're working on now is a pilot of having a utility do this in the street for diverse customers, and so Eversource Gas, that gas company we met with years ago and told them about our concern for our children, they have moved forward and very bold move and proposed three pilots in Massachusetts to our Department of Public Utility. And we are in the middle of a rate case to determine whether they can build this to ratepayers. Whether a gas company can essentially pilot a transition off gas paid for by their customers. And so we have a list of potential sites. There's a lot of enthusiasm in Massachusetts from any number of different types of sites for these pilots, and we're also in conversation with a number of other utilities who are moving forward with pilots, including a pilot proposal in New York by Con Ed and national committees moving forward and, and several others. So these are pilots of the technology but also of the business model and process in terms of the utility of public utility. However, we do have a few case studies, like I mentioned on campuses that are giving us some really interesting data on the efficiency and the cost.
Audrey Schulman 40:23
And the money savings, you know, so not only do you get a huge reduction in emissions, but you know, as Zeyneb earlier, you get paid your money back through energy and water savings really quickly.
Dave Karlsgodt 40:36
Well, I just wanted to clarify then. So the, basically you're trying to get the utility Public Service Commission to approve of the pilots at this point, because they're basically saying, hey, commission that regulates our behavior, we want to completely do something different than what you normally regulate. Can we do it? Is that is that fair to say? Yeah, they're changing. Yes. I mean, we what they're regulating
Audrey Schulman 40:59
Yes, and Way, although we're making an argument that if you do have that gas backup heater, on the system, maybe, you know, a long way away, maybe only in the most dense urban area, then it is a gas system, which is providing the energy through efficiency and through storage. So it's basically the same as a Passive House, which it is connected to gas and never uses the gas is still a gas customer. We're making a passive system that would be connected to the gas and hopefully never use the gas, you know. So that's one of the potential arguments
Dave Karlsgodt 41:42
And how is it going? It sounds like you've been through a couple of hearings or how is it being received by the commission so far? Is that something
Zeyneb Magavi 41:48
I it's really fascinating. The Attorney General's Office has put forward a petition to require the Department of Public Utility to evaluate a plan for question of the future of gas utilities. There's been a number of presentations partly from us and others that have really raised this issue in Massachusetts to the point where it's on the minds of the department. And so the conversation happening within these hearings is a it would have been unimaginable two years ago, I think. And it's actually very hopeful. There's questions about customer base change over time about electrification about the installation of gas, new gas pipe and and whether this can deliver a solution whether this pilot can deliver a solution for the challenges we face. And I think there's an enormous amount of openness. I don't think there's been anyone against the pilot yet from any direction, but simply a very reasonable questioning of cost and profit. Which we welcome. Sure.
Dave Karlsgodt 43:03
One of the questions I wanted to get at that we get a lot in our campus work, is this just sort of strategic direction of should we connect all our buildings and put pipes in the ground and pay the money for a new district energy system or should we isolate each building and make it super efficient with its own solar panels and its own kind of Living Building approach, which, you know, basically means each building is its own standalone Island. It sounds like you guys are on this network approach. I mean, based on the conversation we've had, but the other element of that is, there's this idea of like getting off of gas and electrifying, which typically means switching utility companies and a lot of places like I know here in Seattle, we've got Puget Sound energy, which is a investor owned regulated utility. And then we have Seattle City Light, which is a municipal owned utility. So they're not really the same company. They have different incentives. So it's, you know, they don't really want to be poaching each other's customers or they have kind of De facto rules to keep that from happening. But you sort of bridged that gap.
Zeyneb Magavi 44:05
I would say, first of all, to the, you know, Passive House efforts for an individual building and the wonderful Living Building approach versus a network campus, I would say yes, and there, there are enormous benefits to be gained by reducing the load and demands of any one building and the health impacts are huge to to something like the Living Building Challenge. And a network approach like we're proposing is, it increases the opportunity and efficiency and the resilience of the campus by really not just increasing efficiency, but also allowing the energy sharing between buildings. So when your dorm is operating but you're at maximum demand and your classrooms are not, you have the efficiency of covering the thermal energy needs of the classrooms by storing the energy used from the dorm. For example, in this Colorado Mesa, you get a 40% efficiency game that you can't get any other way by interconnecting your different buildings with their different load profiles. And there's a load canceling and also a load sharing. And then if you make each building more efficient, like within Living Building, you need more or less infrastructure in the ground to do that.
Audrey Schulman 45:48
So that your hockey rink is basically providing the you know, by sucking all the cooling is providing the heating you need for your your chemistry labs or your residences, etc. And, you know, there's this in Colorado Mesa University, which is the one we're talking about. There's also Weber State University and many others, you can actually look at the temperature in the pipes on the control panel and see that some of the buildings are taking heat at the same moment that others are taking cooling. And that for a majority, you know, like during the shoulder months, the boreholes are not even part of the loop. They're just, you know, moving energy around to each of the buildings.
Dave Karlsgodt 46:35
Great. Well, I know that there's the study you did with the engineering firm BuroHappold, which I enjoyed reading through and I'll be sure to put the links in the show notes for that. I think that does a pretty good job of kind of conceptually explaining this as well. So um, but kind of as we're wrapping up here, I guess a couple questions to wrap up. One would be what is five years from now look like for you guys are 10 years now. I mean, you You can pick your timeframe but give us a little glimpse of the future.
Zeyneb Magavi 47:02
I'm the optimist. So I think there's an exciting new business model for the gas utility industry that spreads like wildfire. Maybe fire isn't a good analogy.
Audrey Schulman 47:16
Shared loop of energy.
Zeyneb Magavi 47:19
And, and there is a redirection of investment from gas system replacement and repair to the creation of this renewable thermal grid and is growing, maybe in trenches or segments. we're transitioning the infrastructure while retraining workers and allowing that drive that that business system drive to provide the transition building by building that we have needed for so long, with energy efficiency, of course, and my hope is that perhaps in in this a very challenging situation we find ourselves in the world today. That we begin to shift the way we see our interdependency. And that a stimulus effort that I would assume we're going to need in the coming years could be directed towards this kind of creation of the infrastructure we need for the next century. And that we can move quickly enough with our pilots to have the data and information needed to drive that transition.
Audrey Schulman 48:25
And my hope is simply that the children of today aren't horrified by what we adults have not managed to get done for their future.
Dave Karlsgodt 48:36
Well said Well said. Well, I guess one logistical final question and then kind of a wrap up would be if people want to get in touch with you how they can go to the heat website. How should they get in touch with you?
Audrey Schulman 48:49
HEETMA.org, H E E T M A .org has all the information that we've been talking about, and you can email info@heetma.org.
Dave Karlsgodt 49:01
Great. Well, I've really enjoyed watching the story unfold since that sleepy lunch presentation or post lunch presentation in 2017. So I'm really amazed at how you attacked this intractable problem. And you basically have turned your your likely adversary which the gas companies into your allies and are helping them see a path forward because I really like that it's not just about opposing things. It's a lot about showing a path out of the wilderness, which I think you're really doing, which is super inspiring, especially in these crazy times we find ourselves in I think the world needs more change, management of that kind, to really get to where we need to get to go.
Zeyneb Magavi 49:37
We all have kids, and we're all in this together.
Dave Karlsgodt 49:40
Absolutely. Yeah. So any final thoughts as we wrap up?
Zeyneb Magavi 49:43
Thank you for sharing this story. I hope it gives other people hope and the way it is continuing to give me hope.
Audrey Schulman 49:49
Yes, and I hope that many campuses understand how this makes economic sense and will be attractive to their students and will help the planet.
Dave Karlsgodt 50:00
Excellent. Well, I look forward to keeping in touch with you all as we work on the campus side of this problem and joining forces to change the world. So thank you very much for your time today.
Audrey Schulman 50:09
Thank you so much.
Dave Karlsgodt 50:12
That's it for this episode. Thanks to Kelsey Harding for her production assistance. You can find show notes, transcripts and contact details for our guests on our website at Campus energy podcast.com. If you'd like to follow our show on social media, our Twitter handle is @energypodcast. You can find us on LinkedIn by searching for campus energy and sustainability podcast. If you'd like to support the show, please consider leaving a rating a review on iTunes or just sending a link to a friend. As always, thanks for listening Transcribed by https://otter.ai