Garfield Clean Energy column: The future of heating and cooling is underground

Garfield Clean Energy column: The future of heating and cooling is underground

It’s 100 degrees outside on a late August afternoon at Colorado Mesa University (CMU) in Grand Junction. But for those of us touring campus, we hardly notice because the geothermal cooling inside the buildings is working so well. We’re engineers, planners and energy experts from across the country to see one of Colorado’s quiet energy success stories: the university’s thermal energy network (TEN). Beneath the sidewalks and lawns, a grid of boreh…