Ossining Hails NY Law Allowing Deeper Geothermal Boreholes

OSSINING, NY — New York State Sen. Pete Harckham marked the signing into law of his bill allowing geothermal boreholes deeper than 500 feet at a news conference held Wednesday on Water Street.

Wilder Balter Partners is developing a 109-unit mixed use structure there — to be called Station Plaza — that will utilize geothermal heating and cooling.

A geothermal borehole deeper than 500 feet — one of the first to be initiated in the state for a commercial development — is set for the project at 30 Water Street.

"Station Plaza will be our company’s third affordable multi-family development with a large geothermal system for heating, cooling and hot water," said William G. Balter, president of WBP Development LLC. "This law will allow us to use a smaller portion of the site for the geothermal well field. Fewer wells will result in better logistics and substantial construction savings."

The drilling rig for the project attended the event.

The project to develop the site between Main Street and Central Avenue is a response to community need for more affordable housing, village officials said on the website. It also makes a meaningful connection between the waterfront and the downtown and expand the Sing Sing Kill Greenway linear park, which currently ends where Central Avenue bridges the creek. Plus it removes the remains of the old buildings and remediates the contaminated soil at the former public works facility.

The new development will have 108 rental apartments plus ground-floor commercial and community space. It will be tied into the bedrock cliff at the sixth floor, where WBP will build an access to Main Street. The development will be built to be sustainable for floods and anticipated sea level rise, village officials said.

The Village-owned site at 30 Water Street, prior to its current use as an organic waste yard for the Department of Public Works, was owned and operated by Con Edison.

The new law, enacted in September, will help New York State meet decarbonization goals and boost local economies by opening new markets for clean heating and cooling technologies in densely populated regions — while meeting New York State’s emissions reductions targets as established in the landmark Climate Leadership and Community Project Act, Harckham said.

"Geothermal energy systems, the most efficient way to heat and cool buildings, are a clean energy technology that needs to be encouraged," he said. "The new law allowing deeper boreholes means lower project costs, which will significantly ramp up this alternative energy industry statewide. More than ever, we need to reduce fossil fuel use. Being able to shift toward a geothermal energy source, especially in dense urban settings, will create new jobs and real savings to all involved parties—developers, contractors, homeowners—while boosting our economy."

Joining Harckham and Balter at the news conference were Ossining Village Mayor Rika Levin; Ossining Town Supervisor Liz Feldman; Christine Hoffer, executive director of NY-GEO; Heather Deese, senior director of Dandelion Geothermal and NY-GEO board member; Zach Fink, president of ZBF Geothermal and vice president of NY-GEO; Leo Wiegman and Lauren Brois from Sustainable Westchester; and Suzie Ross from Green Ossining.

To see a video of the news conference, click here.

Closed-loop geothermal systems extract heat from the ground to pass through heating ducts and create hot water. To cool structures, the heat is pushed instead into the ground. The installation of closed-loop geothermal heating and cooling system boreholes is a key strategy identified in the final Scoping Plan adopted by the Climate Action Council.

There have been regulatory barriers in New York to large-scale adoption of geothermal energy systems.

The DEC applied regulations developed for oil and gas wells to geothermal boreholes greater than five hundred feet deep, even though the latter do not involve injection into or extraction from the ground and thus do not have the same adverse impact adverse on the environment in the way that oil and gas wells do. The DEC’s existing regulations also applied on a per-well basis, which added significant cost, a barrier to ground-source heat pump installations and geothermal energy network projects that benefit from multiple boreholes to distribute heat.

Those costs and requirements limited geothermal system design to shallower depths, resulting in projects involving more boreholes. This increased costs (especially for commercial and industrial projects) and decreased the potential market for geothermal systems, especially in densely developed areas.

Fewer and deeper boreholes per project result in lower costs, less waste, little-to-no emissions (unlike the oil and gas drilling for which those prior applied rules were originally drafted), and need less square footage, giving greater access to geothermal resources in cities and other densely developed regions of the state.

The change is significant, Harckham said. Allowing closed-loop geothermal boreholes greater than five hundred feet deep will reduce the cost of meeting New York State’s building decarbonization requirements by nearly $9.9 billion by 2050. It will also reduce the cost of meeting the state’s goal of electrifying 1 million homes by 2030 by roughly $900 million; and reduce the cost of electrifying 85 percent of the state’s building stock by about $9 billion between 2030 and 2050, in 2023 dollars. In nominal dollars, the total cost savings will increase to $16.3 billion by 2050.

"This simple change in law will allow us to have more clean geothermal in our community and less pollution from burning fossil fuel," Feldman said. "We appreciate this important step towards a cleaner, greener future."