Climate Nice Time: New York To Replace Gas Pipelines With Clean Heat For Buildings

Get ready to see a LOT of this in the next decade.

‘They’re generating steam heat, pulsating to the backbeat.’ Image generated by Substack AI, touched up in Photoshop

In another reminder that the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is underway right now — and that this can change for the worse if the government does — utility companies in New York have submitted plans for 13 pilot projects that will replace gas pipelines around the state with the basic infrastructure needed to distribute clean heat from heat pumps (or from underground, even) to multiple buildings at once, Canary Media reports.

The projects are in response to New York’s 2022 “Utility Thermal Energy Network and Jobs Act,” aimed at a win-win approach to decarbonizing heating in the state. Gas utilities will get the chance to play a role in the energy transition by using the skills and equipment they’re good at — installing municipal pipe networks — to distribute water or other liquids to buildings, instead of piping in methane gas that contributes to global warming.

It’s an idea called “district heating” that you’ll be hearing about a lot in coming years, although the basic concept has been around forever. If you went to a large university or have worked on a big corporate campus, you’ve probably already been in buildings that were warmed and/or cooled by a central system that moves hot or cold water around to serve multiple locations, although most existing systems use a boiler that runs on coal or methane gas. But there’s no reason heating/cooling systems can’t use other energy sources, like hot water from underground (Boise has done that since the 1890s), but that’s not all.

As with enhanced geothermal electricity, we’re no longer limited to using natural hot springs, like Boise’s system and others. You can just dig deep enough into the earth to reach hot rock, then pump in water that gets heated up and returned to the surface, where it’s further heated (or cooled in the summer) by efficient electric heat pumps — what can also be powered by wind or solar, of course. See this nifty illustration from the US Department of Energy:

That’s not the only option, though; without having to drill into hot rock, water can also be heated by waste heat from other processes, like industrial uses (“co-generation”) then run through the heat pumps. Also, depending on the existing infrastructure, hot or cold water can be distributed to buildings that have their own heat pumps to make use of the stuff.

As Canary Media ‘splains, the projects in New York

will still involve digging trenches, laying pipelines and installing equipment — the same kind of capital investments that earn gas utilities long and stable rates of return today. But instead of flammable and planet-warming gas, those pipes will carry water or other liquids that transfer heat from underground — or from other buildings and sources in the network — that can be used by heat pumps to keep buildings warm.

Heat pumps, which operate like reversible air conditioners, are much more energy-efficient than fossil-fired furnaces or boilers. They’re even more efficient when they can exchange heat and cold with fluid at a stable temperature, rather than from cold outside air, as the more common air-source heat pumps do.

The thing is, that’s a whole lot of digging, and individual building owners might not find it cost-effective to install the infrastructure for geothermal heat pumps. That’s where the utility companies come in: As they can no longer count on revenue from polluting methane power plants, they can do something good with the equipment and skills they already have, replacing all those gas-distributing pipes with the heat-distribution infrastructure needed for district heating. (Alas, the pipes that now carry methane gas for furnaces can’t simply be switched to carrying heated fluids. Wrong size/materials.)

Also important: The New York law was passed after getting environmental groups, labor unions, and community groups together in a coalition that’s now called UpgradeNY, which is pushing for more utilities to get onboard.

One of the pilot projects in New York, from Con Edison, will be going the waste-heat route instead of geothermal, and it’s doing it in Manhattan’s dense urban environment where a lot of underground real estate is already full of pipes and ducts and subways and Mole People. One of its three projects will bring district heat to Rockefeller Center, even:

For that project, Con Ed plans to convert three large commercial buildings from the utility’s district steam-heating network to heat pumps. These heat pumps would draw on water that’s warmed up by waste heat from sources including the sewers, data centers and adjoining buildings’ cooling systems. 

“There are some misconceptions out there — people think you have to drill a million boreholes” to capture underground heat, [UpGrade NY’s Liz] Dix said. ​“But you can get your heat from different [underground sources]. You can get it from the subway. You can get it from the sewer. And it’s going to help decarbonize Con Ed’s steam system if we do it right.”

Real estate company Tishman Speyer, the owner of 30 Rockefeller Center, is a key partner in the project, she noted. The firm has a strong incentive to participate because the project could lower the cost of complying with New York City’s Local Law 97, which requires all large buildings to reduce their carbon emissions by 40 percent from 2019 levels by 2030.

While it’s a small start right now, this is kind of freaking huge, and just as enhanced geothermal is going to exploit the deep-rock drilling technology developed for fracking, it’s another example where fossil fuel companies, the baddies of global warming, can use their abilities to make money from clean energy instead.

Go! Read the whole thing and feel a small glimmer of optimism about the future, you!

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[Canary Media / US Department of Energy / Volts]

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