By Jilly Edgar
On a cold and misty morning in March 2024, more than two hundred people gathered in a nondescript conference room in Albany to discuss the future of New York State’s energy system. It is rare for a group this diverse—filled with labor unions, state agencies and legislators, utilities, climate justice advocates, and technology executives—to coalesce in the United States, as their relationships have historically been rife with conflicts of interest. In New York, however, a critical yet little-known clean energy solution has forged enthusiastic shared ground between them and served as the theme of the gathering: thermal energy networks.
Allison Considine, the Senior Campaigns and Communications Manager at the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition (BDC), which co-hosted New York’s first Thermal Energy Networks Summit alongside the New York State Pipe Trades Association (NYSPTA), explained how thermal energy networks, or TENs, have unique advantages that “provide this consensus pathway for a lot of stakeholders.” That’s why the organizations present at the Summit had been working together for over two years through a coalition called UpgradeNY to ensure TENs play a central role in the State’s strategy to reduce economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions 85% by 2050, as mandated by the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA).
As part of this strategy, during her 2022 State of the State address, Governor Hochul announced a plan to have two million “climate-friendly” homes by 2030, but Considine pointed out that, three years later, we are not on track to meet those goals. TENs can address this gap because they make it possible to decarbonize entire neighborhoods—or even entire districts—instead of approaching the problem building by building and house by house. Put simply, they unite previously separated buildings through a network of pipes to hyper-efficiently heat and cool them.
In addition to enabling neighborhood scale decarbonization, BDC Director Lisa Dix highlighted how TENs also help achieve a just transition for New York’s workforce and guaranteed investments in underserved communities in her speech at the 2024 NY Thermal Energy Networks Summit. Recognizing TENs’ ability to unite stakeholder interests as much as buildings, BDC helped found UpgradeNY with the New York League of Conservation Voters, the New York State Building Construction and Trade Council, the New York State AFL-CIO, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, the Alliance for a Greater New York (ALIGN), the Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter, and the Alliance for a Green Economy (AGREE). By collaborating on campaigns, policy, and market transformation, these groups are putting TENs at the heart of New York’s just transition.
Historic Roots, Untapped Potential
Thermal energy is one of the most fundamental energy sources at our disposal, like the kinetic energy—or energy of movement—produced by a flowing river or a spinning wind turbine. One of the most familiar kinds of thermal energy is geothermal, or the Earth’s constant temperature of around 55 degrees about 10 feet below ground level. For over 10,000 years, from indigenous North America to ancient Greece and Rome, people have relied upon geothermal energy to cook and heat buildings and imbued it with spiritual and medicinal significance. We continue to take advantage of geothermal energy today when relaxing in the thermal baths and touring the hot springs that are common in the western United States. European and Asian countries have their own long standing geothermal traditions that the United States is beginning to learn from.
At the same time, anything from using computers to running underground subway trains to treating wastewater can produce thermal energy, making it ubiquitous in 21st-century human settlements. Over 70% of this heat generated through human activities is wasted, however, according to the Yale School of the Environment. TENs are designed to capitalize on this abundance and minimize waste by capturing heat produced at the source and distributing it to places where it is needed. Inevitably, TENs also function as cooling mechanisms by removing heat and redistributing it to another location.
While other clean energy technologies, like solar panels and wind turbines, have entered mainstream parlance, TENs continue to fly comparatively under the radar. This may be due to the fact that, rather than generating energy, TENs are capturing and redistributing existing energy, typically between buildings, so that it may be used instead of wasted. Buildings currently rely on fossil fuels for heating and cooling, whether by directly burning oil or natural gas on-site or using an air conditioner powered by fossil-fueled electricity. Replacing these carbon-intensive systems with TENs can significantly lower a building’s greenhouse gas emissions, an important advantage when nearly a third of New York’s greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings.
At the March 2024 Summit, Jessica Azulay, executive director of AGREE, compared TENs to hugging your friends to stay warm in the wintertime. “We can reduce the amount of exposure that our bodies have to cold air and reduce how much heat is leaving our bodies, therefore conserving and keeping heat in for both of us by reducing the transfer of heat from our bodies to the environment,” she explained. “So the big question here is: how can buildings hug?”
TENs, she went on to explain to a chuckling audience, are the hug. They form an inter-building pipe system that allows buildings to share and conserve thermal energy, even if they are not directly next to one another. This physical design is similar to the natural gas distribution system, but instead of moving methane and steam derived from combusting natural gas, TENs move fluid that relocates heat from places that need cooling, like data centers, to places that need heating, like homes.
The overlap between TENs and natural gas infrastructure has been key to winning labor union and utility support for this technology. Harkening back to the industry’s successful installation of 1.5 million miles of natural gas distribution lines in the mid-twentieth century, John J. Murphy, international representative for the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry of the United States and Canada, executive board member of the New York State AFL-CIO and the New York State Building and Construction Trades Council, and fourth-generation union plumber from Plumbers Local 1 in New York City, envisioned TENs as the next generation of workers’ great achievement in his opening remarks at the Summit.
He emphasized how such an enormous task would ensure economic opportunity for disinvested communities across New York. “We will build healthier, climate resilient communities, maintain and create equitable family-sustaining union careers, and ensure that New York has the skilled workforce for tomorrow to realize our clean energy future,” Murphy told the applauding crowd, “That is a just transition.”
Twenty-First Century Challenges
Fully utilizing this technology not only requires extensive pipe work, but also that buildings be completely electrified because electricity powers the movement of fluids throughout the TEN. Thanks to heat capture, these systems are considered some of the most efficient means of heating and cooling available. Though efficiency is often invoked as an empty buzzword, in physics it can be measured by a fairly straightforward concept: the coefficient of performance (COP).1 COPs vary from context to context, but studies have shown that geothermal systems and TENs can provide 300% to 600% efficiency, exceptionally high performance compared to other technologies like a gas furnace or air conditioner.
Escalating energy demands resulting from climate change and technological expansion make finding energy-efficient solutions especially important as we work to achieve a fossil-free future. Not only does efficiency minimize waste in and of itself, but it helps ensure the grid is able to reliably distribute energy between users. Though TENs increase our current grid capacity due to building electrification (as do most other clean energy solutions), they are one of the only renewable energy sources that reduces grid strain and vulnerability because of their exceptionally high COP and ability to make use of heat that is already in the environment. They also replace the work that electricity-demanding air conditioners previously did by moving heat away from a space in order to cool it down.
Preparing the grid for a climate-changed future is perhaps the most important infrastructure question the world currently faces, not only because the grid will become more vulnerable as floods, heatwaves, and other climate impacts intensify, but also because expanding renewable energy means scaling up electric capacity to levels we have never before executed. In the United States, grid infrastructure is more than a hundred years old in many places and prone to technical issues like outages that will worsen without thoughtful and proactive grid upgrade and expansion. New York City alone has over one million buildings, many of which are not fully electrified and still rely on gas furnaces or oil-fueled boilers in their basements. Electrifying all of them through new laws such as Local Law 154—the mandate to ensure all-electric construction—will add significant capacity that has not been adequately planned for yet.
Additionally, the challenges of decarbonizing each building individually, as currently mandated in the City’s landmark climate law, Local Law 97, cannot be overstated. Cost burdens on individual property owners alone threaten its political feasibility and the law has already received pushback, as property owners attempt to meet its first deadlines. Lack of resources also makes it more difficult to build trust between property owners, especially individual owners, and those managing the public programs for decarbonization measures. Oftentimes necessary steps like personal information collection become obstacles for home mitigation and resiliency retrofits.
Networked designs like TENs can address this challenge to spur momentum and alleviate pain points by leveraging shared costs and distributing investment risks among a group, similar to cooperative models like community solar. Getting a large group of residents on board with a project is no small feat, but the advantages of distributing responsibility among property owners and every other stakeholder involved with a large TEN project are significant.
Testing It Out
To fully understand how TENs can work around these challenges, UpgradeNY helped pass the Utility Thermal Energy Network and Jobs Act (UTEJNA) through the state legislature in 2022. The coalition’s first major victory, the bill authorized utilities to construct TEN pilot projects throughout New York with provisions for labor standards and other related aims of the CLCPA, a major step forward in ramping up climate efforts. The New York State Public Service Commission (PSC) released rules that regulate the new utility TENs and help finance this new kind of infrastructure in summer 2024. The aim is to achieve much lower costs than individual building owners would pay undergoing retrofits on their own.
Thanks to UTENJA, twelve thermal energy pilot projects around New York State, costing a total $880 million, are currently under review by the PSC in Buffalo, Rochester, Haverstraw, Ithaca, Brooklyn, Syracuse, Troy, Mount Vernon, Rockefeller Center, Chelsea, and Poughkeepsie. Over the coming years, utilities will draw up plans and submit them for state approval, advancing the state’s understanding of real-world TENs. In one proposal, for the Chelsea project, waste heat will be captured from a data center and used to provide the soon-to-be-redeveloped Fulton Elliot Chelsea public houses with clean and efficient heating and cooling.
In addition to the pilot projects, Jamestown, New York, home to the largest of forty-seven municipally-owned-and-operated utilities with generation in New York State, is scoping a TEN with support from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA)’s Just Transition Site Reuse Planning Program. The program enabled Jamestown to freely assess its options and quantify costs. Jamestown’s heating infrastructure is unique in that it relied upon steam district heating from 1948 to 1969, when customers switched to natural gas due to lower costs. Then, in 1984, the municipality installed what is now its district heating system: a cogeneration (combined heat and power) system to capture waste heat from electricity production and generate both heat and electricity. Seeking to replace this now aged infrastructure, officials sought a new system that proactively addresses Jamestown’s needs.
Jamestown is planning to install a system that utilizes geothermal well fields and captures heat from a wastewater treatment facility to power space heating and domestic hot water for sixty-eight customers. Earlier this year, two Jamestown Board of Public Utilities (BPU) engineers even traveled to Denmark to research a similar operating system and assess how they might be able to replicate it at home. Considine hopes to learn from Jamestown’s pioneering example as the State gears up to construct new renewable energy and TENs.
Jamestown’s TEN as well as the other pilot projects will need years before they are fully operational. In the meantime, the State is looking for potentially faster results at their own properties: SUNY and CUNY campuses. Using funding from the Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act of 2022, Binghamton University, University at Buffalo, SUNY Oswego, Stony Brook University, City College of New York, Brooklyn College, and last but not least, Hunter College, will invest in climate-related construction work including thermal networks, solar PV panels, and electrification by 2026.
What’s Left To Do?
New York is not the only place experimenting with TENs expansion. Utility commissions in Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, and Colorado were reviewing around two dozen proposals in 2024, while eight states have passed legislation in favor of utilities constructing TENs. Massachusetts’ Framingham project is the country’s first utility-operated underground thermal energy network, a one-mile loop of pipes that connects houses, apartments, commercial buildings, a community college campus, and a fire station. Totaling $14 million and already seeking to expand after going online last year, it’s a major step forward for TENs in the US, but it does not entirely replace the existing gas infrastructure. Doing so would likely require not only more legislation, but the consent of some of the most important stakeholders who have not received their fair share of discussion up to now: ratepayers.
For the ratepayer—people like you and me who pay to use energy from the system—the tactics New York and other states are pursuing with TENs, like coordinating strategies among stakeholders and prioritizing investment in underserved communities, are central to implementing an equitable transition away from fossil fuels. This is because ratepayers who continue to use the gas system as fewer people rely on it are burdened with disproportionately high costs. If communities with the least means are left to invest in new infrastructure last, they will also be left with the costs of every other customer who used to contribute to the newly stranded gas system. This unjust and infeasible scenario can be prevented with carefully designed policy to guide the transition.
Because of a utility regulation called the “obligation to serve,” however, it just takes one reluctant customer to keep the old system in place. Every state has regulations requiring gas utilities to provide gas to any customer in their service territory. If there is just one person on a system who does not want to stop using natural gas, the infrastructure must remain operational by law. Removing the obligation to serve in only the pilot project areas, UTENJA misses a critical opportunity by failing to remove it at a wider scale.
Another bill currently awaiting the Governor’s signature in Albany, the New York Home Energy Affordable Transition (NY HEAT) Act,2 would end that obligation. According to WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a member of Upgrade NY, the bill is “designed to make energy more affordable while helping advance New York’s transition to renewable energy, ensuring that New York State’s Public Service Law is aligned with the CLCPA…[and] would end wasteful ratepayer subsidies to build out more gas infrastructure and curb utility costs for the most energy-burdened.”
One of NY HEAT’s proposed provisions is a 6% household income cap on energy bills for low-income customers. The cap is meant to directly address the energy affordability challenges disproportionately faced by customers who are low-income people of color. Additionally, curtailing the obligation to serve and the 100-foot rule, which “requires utilities to build a gas pipeline to any building or home within 100 feet of an existing gas main at no cost to the customer,” seeks to prevent unnecessary and exorbitant costs to the tune of $200 million a year for the remaining ratepayer pool as the State’s own laws deem gas infrastructure obsolete.
In the United States, $347 billion in utility investments into gas distribution pipelines have already been “locked in” to be paid off over the next fifty years according to research from Cambridge, Massachusetts-based nonprofit Home Energy Efficiency Team (HEET). Another $698 billion in future capital costs is hanging in the balance with expansion plans currently under discussion. Leaving ratepayers that kind of future gas bill while mandating clean infrastructure is contradictory at the very least. Creating legislation to manage the transition from fossil fuels to new infrastructure is imperative, especially when its key stakeholders are aligned.
UpgradeNY and all of its member organizations will keep working to ensure some of our most important 21st-century infrastructure enables humans to live more equitably and thrive long into the future. As with all elements of the climate transition, exceptionally thoughtful and creative long-term planning is essential to invest resources intelligently and ultimately save lives. It is a rare opportunity that the interests of so many different groups converge around such a high-potential solution.
- According to the BDC, this coefficient “compares an appliance or system’s energy input to its heating or cooling output. If an electric resistance heater has a COP of 1, that means 100% of the electricity it uses produces an equivalent amount of heat. If a heat pump has a COP of 3, it means that 1 unit of energy provides 3 units of heat or cooling: it is 300% efficient.” ↩︎
- The NY HEAT Act was rebranded shortly before passing the New York State Assembly and Senate as the Customer Savings and Reliability Act. ↩︎
Jilly Edgar works to decarbonize the built environment and improve people’s lives along the way. After working for years as a climate justice organizer, she is building a career in urban planning to advance renewable energy development, strengthen social and physical resilience, equitably distribute costs, and ultimately implement a just transition.
