Tapping the ground is the most efficient means of heating and cooling buildings, but requires boreholes that are prohibitively expensive for most homeowners and businesses to drill on their own. Geothermal ‘networks’ change that equation. Just as power and gas utilities spread the costs of building power plants and transmission lines and gas pipes, they can make geothermal accessible to all by spreading out the costs of drilling hundreds of feet into the ground.

My Nature magazine feature on geothermal networks shows how this largely overlooked solution for moving cities off gas heating is spreading in Europe and North America, and why its performance and politics may accelerate electrification. I also show how this promising climate solution is undermined by a dearth of knowledge exchange between practitioners on either side of the Atlantic.

This is effectively part 4 in an ongoing series of ‘getting off gas’ stories supported by the Fund for Environmental Journalism. On-the-ground insights from New York’s Hudson Valley that enriched the Nature feature wouldn’t have been possible without that grant from the Society of Environmental Journalists.