A critical project in waiting

Like most Manitobans I live in the city. I live in a home built about a century ago, in a well-treed neighbourhood. A 27-year-old gas furnace heats my home — one that needs replacing soon. I’d love to quit burning gas and electrify.

The options aren’t great. Electric heat costs more than double what gas does. Air source heat pumps work much of the winter, but fail during our worst cold snaps, leaving us dependent on expensive electric heat or gas backup — plus a noisy outdoor unit that ruins the patio.

If I had more land, like those with larger rural properties, I could bury horizontal coils in the ground for a fraction of the cost of drilling. But on my small city lot the only option is drilling 400- to 500-foot boreholes in the front yard. Expensive, even with Efficiency Manitoba incentives.

So: keep burning gas, or put up with a noisy compressor and still need a backup heat source. Those are my choices. But they don’t have to be.

I’ve been reading about district geothermal systems — thermal energy networks shared across many buildings.

In Framingham, Mass., the gas utility Eversource built the first utility-owned networked geothermal system in the United States, connecting 125 customers across 36 buildings. The cost to tap in? Just $10 a month — with participants seeing a 20 per cent drop in energy bills and a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions. Canadian Mennonite University right here in Winnipeg is building one for eight or nine buildings.

Why couldn’t my neighbours and I do the same?

Parks — and Winnipeg has plenty — are ideal for burying large ground heat exchangers. Winnipeg also sits on a deep carbonate aquifer with a long history of wells, and we’re already using it: Manitoba Hydro Place, one of the most energy-efficient office towers in Canada, draws heat from a few hundred boreholes drilled in the limestone.

Hockey arenas and data centres are another untapped resource, dumping enormous waste heat all winter. So could any nearby business — a laundromat, a restaurant, a data centre — heat that today simply disappears into the atmosphere.

Who maintains it? How do pipes get from park to home? How are costs shared?

These are real questions, but not new ones — they’re exactly what any utility answers every day. Manitoba Hydro already lays the same kind of plastic pipe to our homes. A utility could finance the infrastructure over 50 or 60 years, just as gas pipes are financed now, and charge a modest monthly fee.

The big difference: no gas to pump from Alberta. The heat is free. And in summer, it cools our homes too. Winnipeg’s geography helps — the Red and Assiniboine rivers naturally divide the city into quadrants, each its own sub-loop, built independently. And for growing suburbs like Waverley West and Sage Creek, if the city simply requires a pipe sleeve during road construction, the cost to connect each home drops from $17,000 to as little as $4,000.

Manitobans of a certain age will remember when Duff Roblin’s plan to dig a floodway around Winnipeg was laughed off as “Duff’s Ditch” — a boondoggle, a fantasy, a waste of money. Today that ditch has saved the city an estimated $40 billion in flood damage.

It is one of the great infrastructure decisions in Canadian history.

A district geothermal network under our streets is this generation’s version of that idea. The technology exists. The need is urgent. The math works. All it takes is the will to dig — and unlike the Floodway, which had to be completely finished before it could hold back a single drop, a geothermal network can be built street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, delivering benefits from Day One and growing as it goes.

Maybe we even need a new Crown corporation to build and run it — one future generations will be just as grateful for as we are for the Floodway.

Stuart Williams, M.Sc., is a Wolseley resident with a master’s degree in computer science. He is a passionate advocate for renewable energy who writes out of an urgent concern for the future of our children.