On Friday, May 24, Governor Jared Polis and the Colorado Energy Office (CEO) announced $7.7 million in grant awards to 35 geothermal projects statewide. Among those recipients was Carbondale-based nonprofit Clean Energy Economy for the Region (CLEER), which received two grant awards for the design and installation of a geothermal energy network underneath the Third Street Center and surrounding buildings.
In April, CLEER hosted an open house at the Third Street Center for both locals and industry professionals to share about a proposed geothermal project to provide clean heating and cooling across 16 acres of central Carbondale. Developed in partnership with the Carbondale Geothermal Coalition, the project will utilize ground source heat pumps, which use water to exchange heat between buildings, and underground boreholes in order to provide zero-emission heating and cooling.
CLEER’s project is unique in that it creates a community thermal energy network in which both private and public buildings — such as the Third Street Center, the Carbondale Branch Library, Bridges High School and residential housing at the 2nd Street townhomes — can all be connected to a single pump system. The connected system would provide an efficient alternative to gas heating, which can also expand to include more buildings as more boreholes are installed.
The grants were awarded through CEO’s Geothermal Energy Grant Program, which funds geothermal projects creating zero-emission electricity and heating. CLEER received $74,000 for legal and business design and $238,012 for eventual installation.
Currently, Colorado does not have regulations for thermal energy networks, meaning that developers have to create bespoke legal and ownership structures for each project.
Since this thermal energy project is also one of the first of its kind, CLEER can’t rely on a pre-existing business model. Instead, the team has to perform the legwork to create a model that works with the various private and public stakeholders included in this community project. However, the lack of both precedent and regulation also means there’s room to consider a variety of options.
Project leader Jon Fox-Rubin spoke in more detail about how the two grants will be utilized.
“We’re exploring a few options already, but [the grant] will just help us fund it better,” he said. “We’re exploring a utility-owned option, we’re exploring a community-owned option, we’re exploring a public-private partnership option where an owner/operator would help develop it, but the Town of Carbondale could be a partial owner.”
The first $74K grant will help CLEER coordinate experts to flesh out each of these options further. Additionally, the different plans are being developed in an open-source manner so that other developers can pull from CLEER’s research for their own geothermal projects.
The second $218K grant is ordinarily meant to directly fund the installation of projects with finalized designs. However, instead of using that money to break ground right away, CLEER intends to use the funding acquired from the State to leverage additional funding from other sources, whether federal or private, for installation at a later date.
In October 2023, the project received $716K from the U.S. Department of Energy for a feasibility and design study as the first phase of the DOE’s Community Geothermal Heating and Cooling Design and Deployment Initiative. This year, more funding is available as part of the second phase of this initiative, but applicants are required to provide matching funds from non-federal sources.
Instead of being used immediately for development, the $218K will be used to satisfy the “additional funding” requirement of the grant application. CLEER will be notified of whether or not they receive the grant by the end of 2024. If the project receives additional federal funding, then installation of the thermal energy network is expected to begin in the spring of 2025.
Should their application be denied, Fox-Rubin stated that the team would pursue funding from private investors and or utility partners. The project team is already in communication with large-scale energy developers, but acquiring funding from this alternate source would likely result in delaying installation past next spring. Either way, the CEO grant will play a major role in bringing carbon-neutral heating to Carbondale.
“It would slow us down, but our plan is to really have multiple paths to success,” said Fox-Rubin.