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Black Swan Lab outlines thermal-network options for Marlborough, flags grant and siting opportunities
Summary
In a presentation to Marlborough’s Climate Resiliency Committee, Audrey Shulman of Black Swan Lab described thermal networks that use ground or wastewater heat, estimated local resource potential (wastewater plants, ice rinks, boreholes) and urged the city to pursue a limited MassDEP wastewater-energy grant to fund a feasibility/design effort.
Audrey Shulman, executive director of Black Swan Lab, told Marlborough’s Climate Resiliency Committee that thermal networks — systems that use ground or wastewater temperatures to run distributed heat pumps — offer a way to reduce peak electricity demand and cut long-term heating and cooling costs.
“Every ice rink produces enough temperature to heat 50 homes,” Shulman said, citing ice-rink waste heat and wastewater as practical local thermal sources. She pointed to a range of ownership models — for-profit utilities, municipal utilities, or nonprofit arrangements — and said municipal ownership can lower the cost of capital compared with a for-profit gas utility.
Shulman walked members through examples from elsewhere in the region and nation: Eversource’s Framingham installation, municipal systems in Boise and Denver, and campus-scale projects at Smith and Mount Holyoke. She said an Applied Economics Clinic analysis and ISO New England projections suggest thermal networks can reduce peak electricity needs and transmission costs if adopted at scale.
On funding, presenters told the committee that the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection is offering a wastewater-energy recovery grant that can cover feasibility, design and installation work and that federal incentives such as provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act can cover a substantial share of borehole installation costs (speaker-cited range of 30–50 percent). Committee members asked about grant timelines, distributed load risk, borehole depths (300–600 feet described), and whether systems require additional backup sources; presenters said many systems include supplemental boilers or electric backup and noted some installed networks have not needed backups in decades of operation.
Local potential identified by presenters included two Marlborough wastewater treatment plants and the New England Sports Center (the presenter estimated 12 rinks could serve roughly 600 homes). Presenters recommended the city consider applying quickly to the MassDEP wastewater-energy grant and said Black Swan Lab would help prepare applications and technical materials.
Committee members raised concerns about siting equity and geographic distribution (noting sources are concentrated on Marlborough’s north and east sides), the difficulty of persuading individual residential customers to retrofit their buildings, and operational risks from a single-system outage. The presenters and several members said a targeted feasibility study — focused first on wastewater recovery — would help resolve those questions and identify the most viable ownership and financing model.
