Our country has a deep political divide over wind and solar renewable energy sources. Generally, Democrats are in favor of them, and Republicans are against them. The current administration is doing whatever it can to stop the growth of wind and solar power despite that they involve nearly $100 billion in US investments and nearly 500,000 jobs.
There is one form of renewable energy that enjoys bipartisan support: geothermal energy. A major reason is that the technology is oil- and gas-adjacent. It involves a lot of the same jobs and a lot of the same equipment. Thus, the oil and gas industry is inclined to pursue geothermal energy.
The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act provided incentives for installing renewable energy including geothermal. While most of these incentives have been reduced or even eliminated under the Trump administration, the incentives for geothermal have remained largely intact.
Geothermal uses pipes and liquids to tap the Earth’s steady temperature of about 55 degrees underground. Heat pumps extract heat from this underground source for warming and pump the liquid back underground for cooling. Geothermal heat pumps greatly reduce the amount of other energy sources needed to heat and cool buildings.
The largest system in the US is in Verona, Wisconsin where 6,000 boreholes drilled hundreds of feet into the earth provide heating and cooling for a 410-acre campus. There are a growing number of geothermal projects in the US. New York, Massachusetts, and Colorado are among the states where geothermal energy is on the upswing.
