This article originally appeared in the October 2022 print edition.
Construction workers broke ground on Upper Elm in May 2022 for Smith’s Geothermal Energy Project. The $200 million project will cut Smith’s carbon emissions by 90% by transforming campus heating and cooling systems and is expected to be completed in 2028. Upon completion, Smith will be one of the only schools in the United States to reach carbon neutrality without transitioning to biofuels (which can have negative environmental impacts) or using carbon offsets.
The project, essential to Smith’s goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2030, has myriad other benefits for students and the environment. It will lower Smith’s water consumption by about 10%, improve air quality, reduce the college’s operational expenses by $60 million over 30 years and make houses more comfortable through better heating and by adding air conditioning.
According to Beth Hooker, Director of Sustainability and Administrative Director of Center for the Environment, Ecological Design and Sustainability (CEEDS), 90% of campus emissions come from heating and cooling systems powered by fossil fuels, so this project will allow for huge cuts in Smith’s carbon emissions. The project is a transition from a 70-year-old heating and cooling system reliant upon natural gas and oil to a renewable, electricity-powered system reliant upon geothermal energy.
“Because of the high upfront costs of drilling wells, geothermal is most suitable for community projects where return on investment is much quicker,” said Corinna Davis ’23, a Sustainable Energy Education Intern at CEEDS. “There are many successful examples of using geothermal [energy] for district heating and cooling, and many other colleges are implementing similar systems.”
The project is ongoing in different parts of Upper Elm. In the coming summers, it will move to the Quad (2023-25) and to Central Campus (2025-28). According to Gary Hartwell, a Smith College Project Manager who has been working on this project since its beginnings, many houses will receive either heating system renovations or full heating system replacements. Air conditioning will also be added to most of these houses, including six houses in the Quad. To carry out this work, about 600 800-foot deep boreholes will need to be drilled in total.
The Geothermal Energy Project has been in the making for over a decade. In 2010, Smith released the Sustainability and Climate Action Management Plan, which laid out plans to research how to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030. The Study Group on Climate Change, which included students, faculty, staff and trustees, was formed in 2015 with the goal to investigate how Smith could best fight climate change.
According to Hartwell, work by the District Energy Working Group (a subcommittee of the Board of Trustees that also included students, staff and faculty) and the Study Group on Climate Change’s “began to inform the [Board of Trustees] of the potential benefits and economic feasibility of a large scale fossil fuel replacement project. Geothermal energy (using renewable electricity) was the obvious solution. Without that early work, it would be hard to receive approval for such a large project.”
The “Report of the Smith College Study Group on Climate Change” suggested converting the campus heating system to a geothermal energy system, while the District Energy Working Group led by David DeSwert, Executive Vice President of Finance and Administration, “focused on every aspect of the project — policy, technology, cost — asking questions critical to ensuring a successful project,” said Hooker.
Smith’s geothermal system will use three heat pumps, as well as pipes extending 800 feet underground that circulate water. In the winter, the water is heated by the sedimentary rock beneath the frost line in the ground, which has a naturally stable, warmer temperature. It is then transferred to the heat pump which heats the water further and sends it to be used by different buildings’ radiators for heat. In the summer, water circulating under the ground discharges its heat to the surrounding rock, and the heat pump transfers the cool water to the radiators for air conditioning. To power the heat pumps, Smith will buy renewable energy sources, like wind and solar.
Hartwell said that “improvements to heat pump technology in the last few decades and [improvements in] energy efficiency in buildings helped identify geothermal energy as the best solution, technologically and economically, for Smith College.”
In 2019, Denise McKahn, Associate Professor of Engineering, began to lead research that acted as a pilot project for the campus-wide geothermal energy system at Smith’s Field House. A borehole was drilled and a heat pump installed, allowing the Field House to be powered by geothermal energy.
The data from the project was used to help inform the planning of the campus-wide system and to ensure that ground temperatures would not be changed in a way that would negatively affect the environment. Additionally, Hartwell said that various geothermal energy studies from the last decade have helped in the project’s design.
In addition to the two groups and McKahn’s project, various consultants and the Facilities Management team have been crucial to the realization of the project.
Davis, the Sustainable Energy Education intern at CEEDS, said that there are many “educational opportunities surrounding the project, such as possible theses and class specific projects.” Hooker is also trying to “involve our community in our goals to become carbon neutral.” She said that classes are engaging with the project in ways like creating digital story maps with Geographic Information System GIS and using cinema to interpret the project. She also said that CEEDS’s “doors are open to talk about our efforts to become carbon neutral.”
More general information about the project can be found on Smith’s geothermal project website.
