Geothermal Heating and Cooling Networks for Green and Livable Urban Transformations -Part I

A wide global consensus has been reached that it’s time to foster sustainable, just, and “green” transformations of society, irrespective of our cultural backgrounds and prosperity levels. This transformation covers all parts of society, thereby influencing our footprints on Earth. European policies now follow catchwords like “decarbonization,” “circular economy,” or “social inclusiveness.” The energy sector represents a crucial part of this transformation process, inside which the heating and cooling of buildings are responsible for almost 50 percent of the final energy consumption and more than 25 percent of the overall greenhouse gas (GHG)emissions (Mathiesen et al., 2019 ). But unlike the electricity sector, the building sector has not been addressed exhaustively by politics in the past decade and is therefore lagging behind when it comes to the green and sustainable transformation. Consequently, only about 19 percent of the energy consumption for heating and cooling in Europe is currently generated by renewable energy, underlining that there is a large potential for improvements (Source: EuroStat, 2019). This article takes a look at hidden opportunities for supporting the green and livable urban transformation by using geothermal energy for the heating and cooling of buildings. Geothermal energy is a natural (and one of the oldest) energy sources available to mankind, which has been put aside in favor of carbon-based technological developments in the past centuries. Currently, it covers a niche inside the energy sector. Natural heat provided by the Earth is available everywhere and may theoretically cover most of our energy demands for thousands of years. Talking about shifting our energy system towards green, environmentally friendly, and on-site available sources like geothermal has an impact on a multilevel scale. It is not just about GHG savings in order to mitigate global warming—it also influences higher health standards by avoiding emissions, such as aerosols or excess heat from cooling. To an even greater extent, the green transformation has strong geopolitical implications by reducing the dependency on energy imports. However, such transformation processes require multilateral technological and socio-economic efforts. This change can only be successfully accomplished if joint long-term visions prevail over short-term gains, which is even truer for the use of geothermal energy.