When Kevin Bright looks past the wire fencing and upturned soil in front of Rochester's City Hall, he sees a greener future. The two geothermal wells being drilled here will eventually provide carbon-free heating and cooling for the city's headquarters.
"After it's completed and the project's done, we'll have the second city hall in Minnesota that is electrically heated and cooled with geothermal, which is pretty exciting," he said.
Bright is the former housing and sustainability coordinator for the Destination Medical Center, an economic development project in downtown Rochester. He helped launch this geothermal project.
The wells are one part of the city's strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 100 percent over the next three decades.
If all goes as planned, this project will help heat and cool at least 1 million square feet of downtown space, including Mayo Civic Center and the public library. Longer term, city officials hope to get approval to create an underground network of pipes that will shuttle heated and cooled air between new residential and commercial buildings in downtown.
Instead of wasting excess conditioned air, Bright says such a system becomes more efficient by sharing it.
"A great example of this might be the civic center in the middle of wintertime when they have a 2,000-person event. All those people in there are contributing body heat 98 degrees to the space, and everyone feels pretty comfortable around 70 degrees," he said. "We can pull that heat from that building and send it to another building that doesn't have that person-heating load, but still needs to be heated."
Rochester's system is coming online at a time when geothermal options are more efficient and affordable than ever. With advances in technology and new federal financing options climate advocates say these so-called "district energy" systems can go a long way in reducing carbon emissions on a large scale.
Click here to read the full article by Catharine Richert on Minnesota Public Radio.
