Large-Scale Thermal
Tap Into the Potential Right Under Your Feet
Whether you have fast-approaching climate targets or are looking to meet future consumer demands, a ground source (or geothermal) heat pump system can help you reach your goals. The thermal needs within buildings, such as heating and cooling of occupied spaces and production of domestic hot water, are challenges to decarbonize, but they also are crucial to address in order to meet New York State’s nation-leading climate goals. Energy-efficient heat pump technology, powered by renewable electricity (either generated on site, or purchased from the power grid), provides a viable option.
Funding opportunities are available to help decarbonize your existing or new buildings, including large single buildings, or multiple buildings such as educational or medical campuses, multifamily complexes, communities, and other collocated buildings using heat pumps and thermal sources like the ground (geothermal), waste water, waste heat recovery from industrial processes, and thermal energy storage to provide heating, cooling, and hot water.
How to Get Started
Completing an energy study of your building can help you identify and evaluate opportunities to reduce energy costs and incorporate clean energy into your capital planning. The FlexTech program shares the cost to produce an objective, site-specific, and targeted study on how best to implement clean energy and/or energy efficiency technologies. A NYSERDA FlexTech Consultant can work with you to complete the energy study. Funding is available to help you determine not only if heat pumps will be a good fit for your heating and cooling needs, but also how to configure a system best suited for a single building or multiple buildings. Additional resources to help you get started with the process are available here.
Support Available After a Study
Large-Scale Thermal Program
In 2021, NYSERDA launched a pilot program called the Community Heat Pump Systems program (PON 4614), which offered funding assistance to perform feasibility studies, detailed designs, and construction of thermal energy networks. Through 10 funding rounds, PON 4614 funded projects at over 50 sites through New York State and identified opportunities and potential solutions to decarbonize buildings using heat pumps and thermal resources such as geothermal, waste water, waste heat, surface water, and thermal energy storage. Visit the PON 4614 awardee page to learn more about the projects.
While PON 4614 sought to identify opportunities for thermal energy networks to provide heating, cooling, and hot water to multiple buildings connected to a network of distribution pipes, there are also many opportunities to scale the use of heat pumps using a standalone, or non-networked, approach.
To help advance technically and economically feasible projects to the design stage, NYSERDA launched PON 5614, the Large-Scale Thermal program to support the design of systems for single building projects and multiple building projects, using either a networked or non-networked approach.
Program Opportunity Notice (PON) 5614
The Large-Scale Thermal program supports the design of large-scale thermal system projects that serve as replicable examples for significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from heating, cooling, and hot water in buildings, using approaches that are clean and resilient, minimize energy consumption, maximize energy recovery, and offer an equitable approach to building decarbonization.
Eligibility requirements and program rules for PON 5614 are available on the Current Funding Opportunities page 
.
A pre-bid webinar was held on July 11th describing the program opportunities and how to submit proposals.
A list of solution providers who have self-identified as being active in the large-scale thermal marketplace, and references to some of their projects, is available. Customers are not required to use these solution providers for participation in PON 5614:
- Solution providers list [xlsx] (please note that this list may be updated periodically).
- Solution providers can request to be added to the list by sending an email to [email protected]
Solution providers and project sites interested in evaluating the feasibility of large-scale thermal systems may continue to submit applications to the FlexTech program for a cost-shared feasibility study.
What is Large-Scale Thermal?
Just a few feet beneath the earth’s surface the underground temperature is a steady 54°F year-round. Geothermal systems, which use ground source heat pumps (GSHPs), uses this steady temperature to heat buildings in the winter and cool them in the summer. How? When the air outside is cold, GSHPs move the heat from the earth into the buildings they serve, and when it’s hot outside, they move heat from those same buildings into the earth. In addition to tapping into geothermal energy, GSHPs can utilize other sources of consistent temperature – including nearby bodies of water and wastewater facilities.
Heat pumps that capture and reuse the heat from the ground and otherwise wasted heat have been installed throughout homes, large buildings, and campuses in New York State. Facilities like college campuses, medical facilities, and other buildings with diverse thermal needs are good applications for heat pumps due to consistently high occupancy, fluctuating usage schedules, and varying heating and cooling requirements within individual zones, such as offices and classrooms, that are difficult to meet efficiently with conventional systems.
Benefits of Large-Scale Thermal
- Reduces heating and cooling costs with a non-fossil fuel source
- Requires minimal maintenance and has a longer life span
- Creates a more comfortable environment for working, living, and learning with quiet, even heating and cooling
- Enables temperature customization and control for different spaces in your building
- Reduces your environmental impact with no combustion of fossil fuels, fuel storage, or carbon monoxide emissions
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