The ground-source heat pump system began delivering heated and cooled water to the BSU campus in 2012. A decade in the making, the project was still ongoing in 2019.
When fully built out the project is expected to cut carbon emissions from heating and cooling the campus in half. Altogether the system will deliver heating and cooling to 47 buildings.
Note: I wrote this originally in 2019 during a visit to the campus for an award. I’d planned to follow the visit up with an article on heat pumps. I never got back to it so I am posting this now—better late than never.
BSU at one time burned 85,000 tons of coal annually. The coal-fired boilers and even the iconic smoke stack have been removed.
The system includes 10 miles of buried distribution pipes, 3,600 boreholes about 500 feed deep into the area’s Trenton limestone, the reservoir made famous by the Trenton gas boom of east-central Indiana at the turn of the 19th century.
At the time this was North America’s largest ground-source heat pump system. The university expects $2 million in annual energy savings from the system.
Note the following links have not been updated since I reviewed them in 2019.
Additional Links
- Gipe Receives Distinguished Alumni Award for His “Notoriety” in Wind Energy
- Heating and Cooling an Up-Scale Hotel with Geothermal Energy in Bonn Germany
- News & Articles on Geothermal Energy
- Geothermal Heat Pump Case Study: Colorado Mesa University
- An inside look at the largest geothermal heat system in the US
- How Canada’s Biggest Geothermal System Heats and Cools a Newfoundland Hospital
