In this episode of Climate Positive, hosts Gil Jenkins and Guy Van Syckle chat with Zeyneb Magavi, Executive Director of HEET, a Massachusetts-based non-profit focused on designing a strategic evolution of aging gas systems into bidirectional ambient thermal grids, with the aim of driving rapid and equitable decarbonization of heating and cooling in urban areas. The enlivening conversation centers around the networked geothermal, a novel technology gaining traction nationwide that utilizes underground thermal energy systems to provide efficient and sustainable heating and cooling. Magavi breaks down how this innovative neighborhood-scale decarbonization solution works, highlights the business case, policy drivers, the benefits for communities, utilities, workers, and more.
In this episode of Climate Positive, hosts Gil Jenkins and Guy Van Syckle chat with Zeyneb Magavi, Executive Director of HEET, a Massachusetts-based non-profit focused on designing a strategic evolution of aging gas systems into bidirectional ambient thermal grids, with the aim of driving rapid and equitable decarbonization of heating and cooling in urban areas. The enlivening conversation centers around the networked geothermal, a novel technology gaining traction nationwide that utilizes underground thermal energy systems to provide efficient and sustainable heating and cooling. Magavi breaks down how this innovative neighborhood-scale decarbonization solution works, highlights the business case, policy drivers, the benefits for communities, utilities, workers, and more.
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Episode recorded December 17, 2024
Chad Reed: I'm Chad Reed.
Hillary Langer: I'm Hilary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Guy Van Syckle: I’m Guy Van Syckle.
Chad: This is Climate Positive.
Zeyneb Magavi: there's that question of the business case for society. As energy policy or planners, where's the money go? Where's it come from? Is it all fair? I think one of the things that's exciting about this technology is that there's something in it for everyone and it is viable. There's room .
Gil: For our final episode of the year, we spoke with Zeyneb Magavi Executive Director of HEET, a Massachusetts-based non-profit with a mission to drive systems change through an ethical and efficient thermal energy transition. Zeyneb pioneered the concept of gas utilities delivering decarbonization through networked geothermal systems, launching Gas to Geo initiative and transforming HEET into a national thought leader on the topic.
It was a great pleasure for Guy and I to speak with Zeyneb about the many aspects of networked geothermal and learn how HEET working to advance rapid and equitable decarbonization of heating and cooling in urban areas.
Gil: Zeyneb, welcome to Climate Positive.
Zeyneb: Thank you so much.
Gil: Maybe to start for the uninitiated, can you explain what networked geothermal is and maybe how it differs from other forms of geothermal? I've heard you refer to it as the coolest technology you've never heard of.
Zeyneb: Yes. Sometimes I say it's the coolest and the hottest technology-
Guy: That's appropriate.
Zeyneb: -just to really confuse people. Yes. I tend to start with the word geothermal. It's a great word. A lot of us love it, but it also is, I like to say, a little bit like the last name of a family of technologies. If you're thinking about Iceland and hot lava, that's a different member of the family than we're talking about today. Geothermal power, direct use where you have a hot spring that powers some buildings, that's all really awesome. What we're talking about today is really a form of the geothermal heat pump. It's accessing temperature that's been stored in what we call the near-surface. It's going to sound far to all of you and to me, a thousand feet down is still near surface when we look at the scale of the earth. It's called shallow.
Gil: Only just don't fall down that hole though.
Zeyneb: Right. It's six inches wide.
Gil: Okay. All right. No baby Jessica situation.
Zeyneb: No. The folks that do the miles-deep drilling for geothermal power tend to joke that we're doing pinpricks. It's a six-inch wide hole, geothermal borehole up to about a thousand feet down. It's really accessing stored temperature or thermal energy from millennia of solar energy and our earth. That's really cool. It's geothermal energy. There it's everywhere, which is a beautiful part of this technology. Using a heat pump, which we have air source heat pumps, we have our refrigerators are actually heat pumps, a heat pump just moves temperature one way or both ways. Using this heat pump connected to this geothermal energy source, you can get the lowest cost heating and cooling for a building. What we are talking about today is when you take that and you interconnect it together in a really interesting new way, a very simple way, you get something new. A little bit like taking a computer and networking it together and you get the internet that behaves a little differently.
Gil: A series of tubes, right?
Zeyneb: Yes. You put some pipes with water or water with a little glycol, underground and interconnect the buildings in big loops and you get an even higher efficiency and performance. You also, you remove, some of the barriers to the geothermal heat pump. I'm sure we'll get into all that.
Gil: Yes. I want to break it down, but let's just look at a little bio. What inspired you to focus on networked geothermal before we break down the system and the business case and so forth. Well, what brought you to, HEET, which stands for Home Energy Efficiency Team?
Zeyneb: Yes. HEET is a wonderful little, nonprofit in Massachusetts that got its start with a bunch of neighbors coming together to try to just do tangible work to address carbon and climate change. It was Home Energy Efficiency Team because we would go from building to building and do weatherization to cut carbon and bills, the win-win. That is in our roots, that efficiency. We've come a long way and I really joined this though I have a background in physics and global health and sustainability. I really came into this from an unusual approach.
I was a mom increasingly worried about climate change and its impacts. I understood enough of the data to realize how out of scale individual action was. I felt like I had to do something and that's actually how I got involved in this space, despite my background. My background has helped and led to me identifying this as the path forward.
Gil: Right. It was a study, right, that you initially were working on that brought you to the organization on gas utilities.
Zeyneb: Yes, there were a bunch of us going after the outsized lever of methane emissions long before that was popular. We were trying to find the most efficient cost-effective high-impact way to cut methane emissions from our gas system. I ran a study, working with our three major gas utilities in the state to identify a technology and a method to, find the largest volume leaks for the first time. Think about hazard of leaks in terms of climate impact, and to then prioritize those for repair. It was a fabulous and exciting project that spanned everything from flux and the technology to changing policy and regulation.
Gil: Massachusetts, I assume, like many states, has an aging natural gas infrastructure system and I assume it was mandated by law that this study needed to take place. Was the assumptions correct? No.
Zeyneb: No. Massachusetts absolutely leads and they also have one of the oldest gas systems. Not the oldest, but one of the oldest. Our gas systems went in the ground. There's some pipes from the time of Lincoln's presidency, which is really impressive, I'll just acknowledge.
Gil: Yes, you got to hand it to him, yes.
Zeyneb: They're leaking a bit now, but many people in Massachusetts were able to get a law passed to prioritize environmentally significant leaks. There wasn't a known method in science to rapidly identify which ones by volume because all of the technology in the gas industry was focused on hazard identification, which is not the same thing. We initiated this study and convinced all of the parties to collaborate and delivered it in unanimous, as in gas utilities and environmental activists and scientists all together submitting a regulatory proposal to the regulators for enactment of that law.
Guy: Can you talk a little bit about how you built that coalition? I think it sounds like you were able to build a pretty-
Gil: Come on, that happens-
Guy: -friendly relationship with some of the utilities, right?
Gil: Yes, that happens all the time, guy. No.
Zeyneb: Yes. I think one of the best and most important parts of the story is, and I don't want to minimize for a second how incredibly hard it was from all angles. I will say that we started from a good place. I like to say no one loves a gas leak. There wasn't a fundamental disagreement. There was simply a lot of challenges in process enactment, trust, and so on. We went straight at actual shared data. By studying it together, we were able to agree on the data. Then we also just did an enormous amount of work actually listening to each other. I know that sounds cliche, but man, it is not actually as easy as it sounds.
Adjusting and showing respect, including stating clearly when we disagreed. There were large areas of disagreement. Finding instead, focusing instead repeatedly on where we could agree. Over time, that process where we showed respect to each other, where we listened and we tried to find common ground and gave everyone a little of the benefit of the doubt every time, that built a trust that was unexpected from all parties. In fact, there was this moment when we'd completed the study, we'd had a 300-person event at MIT to announce the outcomes and together a shared commitment to the shared plan we'd developed.
Then we were supposed to present at the Department of Public Utility our shared plan. Several gas executives were in Ohio the day before and had their flight canceled. They rented a car. They tried to find another flight. They rented a car. They drove through the night, arrived in rumpled suits, talking about rainbows at dawn to arrive on time to co-present with us. It was moving. They said, "Well, you worked so hard, we couldn't let you down." It was an extraordinary place to start because the very next day after that summit that I mentioned, we said, "Okay, so methane leak reduction is a bandaid, but we have a bigger problem. How do we find a cure? What does the future look like for this utility?"
We have all this aging infrastructure and putting investment in for decades could lead to stranded assets and a death spiral. Is there a way to have the transition that we need in terms of both climate and affordability and safety, and also ensure that we have a stable and just transition with workforce, with all people having access to whatever the energy of the future is. And We opened up that conversation at that point with the trust that we'd built.
Gil: Excellent. Let's get into those primary climate and economic benefits specifically for networked geothermal. Why don't you run through them,
Zeyneb:At the time, from all the key stakeholders, we found that the core needs were first high safety and security. That was something we learned to understand from the gas utilities in another level than we had before, that prioritization of safety. 100% combustion-free in order to meet our climate mandates in Massachusetts and also simply to make it a technology resilient to the future. After that, also, of course, reliable is critical to nearly everyone, and resilient is related to climate and part of reliability in the future and related to safety as well.
Then we had one that was interesting. We wanted it to be scalable and adaptable as the climate changes and scalable to basically get to the speed and scale needed to meet our goals. We wanted to ensure that the workforce had a just transition and that there is sufficient workforce to build or do whatever is necessary. We really cared from the beginning about equity of access and not just affordability. Yes, affordability for all consumers, but also that this was an approach and a transition that didn't leave the most vulnerable behind.
We also understood that it needed to be economic for the utility that exists in order to not land on the backs of the ratepayers of that utility, that there needed to be a reasonable and rational business model for that entire transition, for the entities now and in the future. Then there are two more that we added over time that were not in the original list. One of them is that interconnection and support and benefit to the electric grid in the future energy system. Another is a optimization or reduction of water use, which has come up in a lot of locations, not so much in Massachusetts.
Guy: Question, if you could dig in a little bit more into the interoperability as we think about other climate solutions, the interoperability with solar and the grid more broadly, and battery storage and heat pumps and how that is taken into account and how that role of this networked geothermal fitting in with all the other solutions coming online.
Zeyneb: Oh, we absolutely see an ethical thermal transition as involving a lot of pieces of the puzzle on the table. The more everything fits together and there's co-benefits, the better chance we have of doing a good job. I think solar and other sources of renewable electricity are an obvious wonderful co-benefit to a thermal network covering the electric energy needed for the pumps and both the pumps of the loop and the pumps of the buildings, the heat pumps. That can be both a resilience move so that you can island and of course, just a cost-effective move.
Then there's also some really fun interconnect abilities. For example, if you have excess wind energy at night that no one's using, so your price has dropped to near nothing and you have a thermal grid, you can dump energy into the thermal grid and warm it up, boost it before everyone needs it in the morning. It's a form of energy storage that gets immediate use. You can also look at the thermal grid as a very highly coveted long-duration storage mechanism. It flattens electric grid loads on a seasonal basis in several of the projects we have data on. The geothermal heat pump has this impact on the grid and it's much needed right now. It has a number of electric grid impacts, I would say.
Guy: I think highlighting its play as a thermal storage asset and then that long-duration asset as well, probably I think underappreciated across the space. Thank you again for highlighting that. As we jump into things, it'd be great to hear about your vision for the scalability of networked geothermal and maybe starting with that super cool Eversource pilot that I know you've gotten to talk about on a number of occasions. I'd love to hear more.
Zeyneb: Yes, absolutely. It is really super cool because of course, we all know that it's wonderful to plan things, but actually building them is quite a bit more extraordinary. Kudos to Eversource for doing that. They've got an operational ambient temperature single pipe loop. Just to zoom in on the definition of what we're talking about, it's a thermal energy network that has geothermal boreholes. It's a mile loop in a lovely neighborhood in Framingham, Massachusetts. [GJ1]
It's an environmental justice neighborhood and a community that's been really engaged in thinking about clean energy. It's an amazing community and we've been really privileged to get to know all of them over the past couple of years.
Gil: It's 36 buildings, that's right? 24 of which are residential units?
Zeyneb: Yes. If you count it as customers, it's a little over 135 customers because a bunch of the buildings are multi-resident. It's a very mixed-use neighborhood. There are some residential single-family homes, but there is also a fire station, a school, and a bunch of low-income housing and some commercial buildings that are all hooked up. Yes, it had the ribbon cutting this past June and they've been commissioning buildings on and connecting them since then. It is functioning beautifully with water flowing through the main pipe into the bore fields, maintaining that temperature. The temperature around the loop is steady and then it's delivered to the buildings who use their heat pumps to heat or cool as the customer wishes. It has become, of course, a touchpoint for this technology and questions of the future. I can't tell you how many tours both Eversource and HEET have run out there.
Gil: Yes, no pressure on you. Get it right.
Guy: I'm looking forward to our field trip.
Zeyneb: You're welcome to come. We do it all the time.
Gil: The residents don't mind that we go look at their boreholes.
Zeyneb: Here's the dirty secret of this technology. I've come up with the line that there's nothing to see and that's a feature. You have to focus on the trees, the people, the community, the food, because everything's underground.
Gil: It's better that way.
Zeyneb: It is. Yes. The town's been just incredibly gracious at all the tours. There's been guests from as far as Ukraine and Mongolia. It's been a really exciting time and a lot of people put a lot into it.
Gil: And part of the work did before and the education and public outreach. I imagine your organization is developing this sort of playbook. As you replicate that with other pilots, maybe that's a segue to the Department of Energy. You just won a grant I think recently. I think it's to do another pilot and this Department of Energy has been largely supportive of networked geothermal. Could you talk about their interest in it and then plans for the next pilot?
Zeyneb: Absolutely. Yes, to the community coming first and tons of community outreach and a playbook. Absolutely. That led to Framingham and Framingham led to an initial grant from the Department of Energy's Geothermal Technologies Office that included Eversource and the City of Framingham in a HEET-led grant to do the design of an expansion of the first loop. The first expansion of a gas utility geothermal network. There has been a down-select process. We just heard last Thursday that we were awarded the-
Guy: Congratulations.
Zeyneb: Yes, it's very exciting. Funds to actually do construction. Actually, the way it's intended to work, of course, I'm going to have to do an important caveat, which is the infrastructure that's going to go in the ground is going to need permission from our Department of Public Utilities. Now that the grant has arrived, as soon as that's finalized, then there will be a submission to our utility regulators to get permission. Then we will hopefully move forward to construct the second loop.
Guy: In terms of that construction process, just to get visual on it for a second, what goes into that? We have boreholes, what then goes into connecting that piping system to the actual buildings and homes? What does that construction timeline generally look like? Assuming that everybody comes through with the permits you need.
Zeyneb: Yes. I can speak to the timeline that we put in the grant, but I want to frame that first by saying that the first project, and undoubtedly the second, and probably the third, there is a learning curve for all the workforce and everyone involved. I just think it's so important to acknowledge that. I also want to point out that there is an easy disconnect between the function of the loop with borefields and the addition of buildings. That's actually a core part of that utility growth model. This can be a scalable utility infrastructure because you can bring buildings on and off over time.
That first commissioning of like, okay, the loop's functioning, the pumps are on, the borefields are on, and now we can start to connect buildings and doing that over time. There's now the potential that buildings that hadn't been able to sign on because there was a size limit on the project from the initial permission can hopefully sign on in the future. That's no problem. You can do it in a very staggered way, converting buildings month by month and adding them onto the system. From our perspective at HEET, since we are doing research, measuring the underground temperature, watching the whole system to be able to publish and make recommendations on best practices and design, and operations, we are really excited to have that staggered addition of buildings over time to watch how the system responds to the loads.
Chad: Climate Positive is produced by HASI, a leading climate investment firm that actively partners with clients to deploy real assets that facilitate the energy transition. To learn more, please visit HASI.com
Gil: In terms of the pipes themselves, this is something that gas utilities, it's very comparable technology. I read the pipe fitters love it, the unions, it's like they know how to do this. They've been doing it a long time for our gas infrastructure
Zeyneb: Absolutely. The gas workers are absolutely qualified. It was a beautiful story for those pipes going in the ground, which a lot of folks would say, "Oh, that's hard putting infrastructure in streets," right? For the gas utility, that was actually the most straightforward.
Gil: They do that all the time.
Zeyneb: They do it all the time. The gas workers who install gas pipe came one week to the next from gas to geo, got introduced to the project, and started installing pipes with really no issues. Then went back to installing gas pipe after the project was done.
Gil: Just back to one more policy thing because I think it's timely, you got to go to the DPC for this expansion with the grant. Massachusetts, I understand it just passed in the last month, a new climate bill. Among those provisions is some enabling mechanism, you can explain it, that allows gas utilities, I think, to incorporate this more fulsomely in their business model going forward. Did I capture that correctly?
Zeyneb: Yes.
Gil: That's quite novel to have that extra.
Zeyneb: I'm hopeful it's becoming less and less novel.
Gil: Yes. Someone's got to be first, right?
Zeyneb: Massachusetts passed permission to demonstrate and pilot first many years ago. This past law just last month is a really critical turning point where we actually redefined the gas utility as having permission to sell geothermal energy.
That has in some form happened now in eight states. There are laws passed that in some way permission a gas to geo transition. Some of them require demonstration projects and others simply permission them, but it is spreading. There are more states filing for the coming year. It's a very exciting movement nationally.
Gil: Actually, I'm just going to admit, the first time I heard the term networked geothermal was from my Maryland state delegate, a woman named Lorig Charkoudian.
Zeyneb: I love delegate Charkoudian.
Gil: She's amazing. I said, "What are you working on?" She's always working on some great climate bills. I actually should know. I don't think it passed last session.
Zeyneb: Oh no, it did. The WARMTH Act.
Gil: Oh, it did.
Zeyneb: It's a brilliantly named too.
Gil: Shame on me for not knowing that, but I'm sure she's got the next level thing. That just stuck with me because of my admiration for Lorig as an environmental policymaker. Maryland, we're next, right? We're always-
Zeyneb: What I love about delegate Charkoudian and the way she led this is exactly what we hope for, where she brought every stakeholder to the table, listened, worked the way through labor, industry, environmental, we're all aligned. The WARMTH Act passed. It not only has now moved this pathway, decarbonization pathway forward in Maryland, and there are pilots and demonstration projects now moving forward. It also, and this is one of my favorite parts, it also has required a standardized data collection from them using our database. Three cheers for Maryland, the WARMTH Act, and Delegate Charcutian.
Gil: Okay. What about other states? It's like cold states…Minnesota, New York.
Zeyneb: Minnesota's fabulous. They actually had a number of thermal energy network-related pieces of legislation, and they have also projects moving forward, and it is permissioned there. Also, New York, of course, was really second after Massachusetts but went further with a standalone bill called UTENJA Utility Thermal Energy Network Jobs Act. They have 10 projects from gas utilities, designs of which are due in January. Different model again, but Colorado went after that, and they've also got projects moving forward with Xcel Energy. Then Washington State, and California, and Vermont, and I'm hoping that I'm not live dropping someone, but it's very exciting. I think there's likely to be a number of other states soon.
Gil: And use case is mixed, right? Some of it's residential community, some businesses, others, I'm reminded of the application of, campus, right?
Zeyneb: Yes.
Gil: It's not just residential, of course.
Zeyneb: Definitely not. That would be a shame because this is, if you've got all the pieces of the puzzle on the table for our energy transition, one of the most useful spots to stick this is in mixed-use urban areas. Yes, you can put it almost anywhere. Your questions are really about cost-effectiveness and optimization. I think most of the demonstration projects across, there's a wide variety. There's new build, there's retrofit, there's residential only, there's mixed-use, there's some with some industry included for all kinds of thermal. I think that's part of our learning process is understanding optimization and outcomes really specifically and being able to predict them.
Guy: Love that. I think, yes, the diversity of the solution and the ability to work across all these markets really makes it an interesting and impressive to hear what's going on the policy side. Could you explain a little bit the role of Utility Networked Geothermal Collaborative and what's going on there?
Zeyneb: Yes, it's such a beautiful story. We were initially reaching out and getting outreach from gas utilities. One of the early ones we started speaking to was Northwest Naturals and then also Vermont Gas. Two amazing executives in those companies together with some others said, "Well, we all keep getting calls about this, but wouldn't it be great if we got together and just shared information more efficiently?" They launched this collaborative and we keep sending more gas utilities to them and they keep growing on their own. They're now at 29 gas utilities nationally, which is nearly 50% of gas customers in the US. They're moving to a monthly meeting.
The interest is palpable. The idea of course, is that together they can share information, de-risk, and really optimize their individual utility planning for this new technology.
Gil: What's the emerging business case, right? As they're figuring this out, is it, I think I read in Massachusetts, it's a $10 monthly charge. How are they grappling with that? In the spirit of not asking you to totally speak as a gas utility, but you spend enough time with them. It's always a question, right? How are they going to?
Zeyneb: It's super critical to all of the utilities involved to understand. I've learned that business case can mean different things. There's the business case for the utility. There's the business case for the ratepayer. There's the business case that gets provided to the regulators. Then there's that question of the business case for society. As energy policy or planners, where's the money go? Where's it come from? Is it all fair? I think one of the things that's exciting about this technology is that there's something in it for everyone and it is viable. There's room for innovation. It is viable. There's room, because of course, the geothermal heat pump and the geothermal network has the lowest operating cost on a individual customer monthly energy basis, and also on the maintenance of the infrastructure. It has a very high upfront cost. Really understanding where to place that, over what time period, and how much headroom we have, I'm going to do what I think is best, which is to say, I want us to have that conversation with data in hand. That is why we're collecting tons of data. We've launched a national database. I mentioned that Merrilin will be submitting to it as well. We are increasingly hoping that over a couple of years, we will be able to propose really just rate-making that is data-based. Until then, I think that the route Eversource took, which is to have a participatory charge that isn't directly linked to expected initial costs, makes so much sense for those customers who agree to go first, as everyone, as I said, is learning.
Guy: Right. You were talking about how some of the existing gas infrastructure has been around since the time of Lincoln. That has to make me think the useful life on these systems is pretty good.
Zeyneb: It's great. The boreholes are guaranteed at 50 years, so that's what would go on the balance sheet, but there are 100-year-old ones and no one expects them to keel over at 50. Not unlike our gas infrastructure, as you mentioned. The pipes, again, often rated at 60 years, but everyone widely and verbally assumes it's 100-plus years.
Gil: A less volatile liquid going through them during that life cycle.
Zeyneb: Yes. Absolutely.
Gil: Let's talk about that, dealing with the high upfront capital costs, right? Can we talk energy tax credits in the code today and which ones, I suppose, utilities are putting in there, modeling for these projects. Is it a mix? It's the ITC, soon to be the tech-neutral ITC. Is it other credits? Just curious what these projects are leveraging.
Zeyneb: Every state has a little bit of a different layer cake of local credits. A lot of them cover some weatherization, for example. Any of these projects basically, adds up all the existing layers for that location. The ITC can be from 30 to 50%, depending on your design and product and workforce decisions. There was a lot of question out there, just to get a little detailed for a second. The ruling initially, the initial draft ruling on what qualified as a geothermal heat pump system for the credit, hadn't taken into account a utility owner. Required both the heat pump and the infrastructure, the borehole, to be one single owner.
Gil: Oh, and they just fixed that in the section 48.
Zeyneb: Yes, they did.
Gil: Yes, we can nerd out about this on this podcast.
Zeyneb: Oh, we can? Oh, good.
Gil: Yes. No, they fixed that. It was an important designation in the recently finalized section 48 ITC guidance.
Zeyneb: Oh, okay.
Gil: We're on. Yes, we're speaking the same language. I think our audience hopefully won't mind that. Good win for networked geothermal.
Zeyneb: It was a good win. I want to acknowledge that is so directly connected to the way we've been working. You mentioned the utility collaborative. We had the networks in the organization, an advocate network, and others that we were able to really share this information rapidly and get a lot of letters and explanation and support from a lot of different voices into this process. I think that is directly what resulted in a very reasonable ruling.
Gil: That's great. I think maybe without that, I'm not sure that it would have been on the list of priorities for the American Gas Association. It's just a guess. You're building that network. No comment. All right.
Zeyneb: Yes, I think I'll say it this way, that geothermal has just not been on the radar for no reasonable reasons. Federal government, state governments, it's always been on the side. I think that's changing rapidly.
Gil: Yes. Great to hear.
Guy: As you think about that opportunity over the coming decade and growth of the industry, what do you see as some of the obstacles there, and how do you see the industry evolving to overcome those and really scale impact?
Zeyneb: Yes, I think one of the first obstacles that is, actually you're helping with right this moment is really just education. Getting the most accurate, reasonable information out with the right language and definitions. It's the challenge of something new. There's some risk in moving rapidly forward like getting reasonable guidelines to control project costs and design and so on. We're in the midst of that challenge. I think those are very typical to something a little bit novel. I would also say that I worry a little bit because of that it's an engineered solution and because we really care about those benefits actually being ethically, justly distributed to all. I really want to see us have a very database and very fair approach to the regulation and boundaries on this technology as it scales. I want to make sure that happens.
I think, just right back to education again, and while we have an enormous opportunity with the gas workforce transition, the drilling, the geothermal drilling, is a key challenge. There are not enough geothermal drills and drillers and not a lot of structure to change that. We launched the first driller technician tutorial with an 80-hour curriculum in Massachusetts this past year. We're hoping to scale and share. There's now a geothermal drilling association that's going to try to take that task on. I think it's really interesting to look elsewhere and see.
France recently made a plan, a geothermal roadmap to use geothermal heat pumps to get them to the same amount as, incidentally, the Russian gas they import. One of the first acts they did was to launch driller training schools and buy a lot of drills to lease. I think it's a key barrier, but it's also such a solvable barrier that it doesn't worry me too much. We can do this.
Gil: Yes, and I imagine-- there are distinct differences in the-- I'm really going to show my ignorance here. The drilling that's required for more of the utility scale. You mentioned it was a pinprick in this case, but the guys using the fracking technology out in Nevada, they're leveraging maybe that different drilling workforce base. You're saying maybe more for a distributed driller mindset? I'm just trying to zero in on that.
Zeyneb: Those folks are highly qualified drillers, and we welcome them to come over to geothermal heat pumps.
Gil: They can do both.
Zeyneb: Yes, there's a little bit of training to switch from either water wells or oil and gas wells to geothermal because you have to learn how to set the loop and grout. It's not a big step. The question is really whether we have created a sufficient market and compensation. At the moment, competing with the wages for a driller in the gas production space is not always possible.
Gil: Interesting.
Zeyneb: The one thing I'd love to say that's a little nerdy is I really think we've got to not just get thermal energy networks and geothermal energy networks on the table in the puzzle. I think we have to actually put thermal energy itself more clearly on the table and start naming it and quantifying it and really thinking about it. Just to do that for a moment. I want to point out that I talked about that geothermal energy, but there's this other energy that I want to call anthropogenic geothermal. That is the excess energy that has been absorbed due to climate change in our bedrock, our sea, our lakes, and rivers.
To me, topping that is such an incredible win-win. I think all of humanity uses half a zeta joule of energy a year, and the ocean is currently absorbing an excess of five zeta joules. Why can't we use some titanium seawater heat pumps in Boston Harbor and heat a bunch of Boston buildings? That's one of the things we're having fun looking into and trying to map and think about.
Gil: Yes, so say that again. Titanium?
Zeyneb: The first time I ran across this is there's a Chinese Olympic media center on the ocean that has a titanium seawater heat pump under a dock that does all the heating and cooling for this massive space. There's some more of those out there. There's one in Denmark I found in a fjord. I thought, "Well, why not?" Physically, there's nothing in it that doesn't make sense. We just don't have it on our radar. This is a perfect example of putting thermal energy on the table, thinking about the thermal energy that's all around us, and starting to move it, tap it, and optimize. I think that's part of how we're going to get to the better future.
Gil: Are you ready for the hot seat lightning round? There are no wrong answers, mostly fill-in-the-blank, first thing that comes to your mind. You ready for it?
Zeyneb: Yes.
Gil:Fill in the blank. Something I once believed to be true but no longer do is--
Zeyneb: When I first got into this space, it was partly because I had implicitly without thinking about it, believed that the system would protect, for example, my children's well-being. I no longer assume that. I now believe that for humanity, for the earth, for my own children, for the people I love, that I have to think and act. I think that was, like, a really critical transition for me.
Gil: A piece of advice I have followed is--
Zeyneb: One of the things that pops in my head is to trust my gut but I think the more important one is to think about the impacts of every decision on the relationships and not just the outcomes.
Gil: All right. Open-ended. This one's fun. Let me put you on the spot. You were named one of the Bostonians of the Year by the wonderful, timeless Boston Globe, recently. How did that make you feel?
Zeyneb: Oh, stunned first. I did not see that one coming. Really an incredible honor. I'm going to definitely keep the picture of my face next to Iowa DeBary, who's such an incredible actress.
Gil: Were there some Celtics on there too?
Zeyneb: There were Celtics right at the top. Yes.
Gil: They won the big ship.
Zeyneb: They did. It was an incredible list to be on, and it was an incredible honor. I think it made me feel proud to be a Bostonian. I was born locally and grew up here and-
Gil: Oh, that's especially true. I wasn't sure if you were born locally or you're moved, but that's got double hit you then.
Zeyneb: It did.
Gil: Did you have to out of guilt, renew your Boston Globe subscription, or did you already thankfully have one?
Zeyneb: I had one. Thank God.
Gil: Oh, good. Good.
Zeyneb: Yes.
Gil: All right. Finally, fill in the blank. We ask all our guests this. Finish the sentence. To me, climate positive means--
Zeyneb: That there's an abundance of possible solutions going forward and that together, we can absolutely get to a more positive post-climate catastrophe space.
Gil: Thank you so much for joining us
Guy: Thank you so much.
Gil: If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please leave us a leave a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. This really helps us reach more listeners.
You can also let us know what you thought via Twitter @ClimatePosiPod or email us at climatepositive@hasi.com
I'm Gil Jenkins.
And this is Climate Positive.
[GJ1]Delete and clean up my interjection so it blends into next answer