Many of Boston's universities, hospitals and other large institutions could someday heat and cool their buildings by exploiting the thermal energy in the waters of Boston Harbor, Fort Point Channel, and the Charles and Mystic Rivers.
That's the goal of a new project launched Wednesday by the Green Ribbon Commission, a business association that works with the city of Boston on climate initiatives.
Engineers and leaders from some of the area's largest energy-users met Wednesday at UMass Boston to kick off the year-long demonstration project, which is being called the Boston Area Thermal Energy Network, or BosTEN.
The hope is to develop efficient networks to distribute thermal energy in a way that could lower the institutions' emissions and reduce their reliance on gas and electricity while also saving them money, said Lindsay Butler, executive director of the Green Ribbon Commission.
"We have about 30 anchor institution representatives here today from higher education, healthcare campuses, large commercial real estate, the cities of Boston, Medford, Somerville, and Cambridge, the commonwealth," Butler said.
About 72% of Boston's carbon emissions come from these institutions' buildings, she added.
"We see them as potential customers of this future system. And so we want to bring them along with us as we design this project," she said. "We want something that's technically feasible, economically feasible, and feasible from a regulatory and permitting perspective. But we also want something that's going to work for the large institutions."
Vicinity Energy, a Boston-based energy provider, is currently working on a similar system, using thermal energy from the Charles River to create steam to heat industrial buildings in Boston and Cambridge.
At Wednesday's launch event, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu called the initiative a "major pillar" of the city's climate action plan.
"Our rivers and harbor have long been the spirit of our city," Wu said. "They're where we swim with our kids, kayak with our friends, gather with our neighbors. And now we're off to find out if the thermal energy there can power our homes and businesses more efficiently and more affordably than ever before."
The city's chief climate officer, Brian Swett, said the plan would likely create a series of nodes around the city that could expand to offer heating and cooling to more buildings, rather than simply a single network.
"I'm tremendously excited because we've known for a long time in Boston that some of the sectors that are most economically vibrant are also our most intense energy users," Swett said. "So when we think about labs, when we think about hospitals, higher ed, you know — those are very hard to get to zero carbon on electrification alone. They just have such a big thermal load. And we hadn't thought previously about network-based, ocean-based thermal."
Now they are, he said.
"What we hope to have at the end of this one-year project is some ideas as to where we could really start an investment-grade pilot of ocean source thermal energy for the city of Boston," Butler said.
Creating thermal networks would happen in phases, she said.
"So we could start with the large anchor institutions in a first loop and over time add additional neighborhoods and continue to add on to the system," Butler said. "So we're talking several years before we can really unlock the full potential of thermal energy for the region."
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