West Union, Iowa Has A Municipal Geothermal System. Now Others Want To Know More About It.

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West Union in central Iowa is not on any major interstate highway routes. It is not near any of Iowa’s main cities, like Cedar Rapids or Des Moines. But it has something no other community in Iowa has — a full fledged municipal geothermal system that consists of 132 boreholes 300 feet deep connected by horizontal pipes under its streets that supply water that is 50 degrees Fahrenheit all day, every day, year round.

Many of its municipal buildings are connected to the West Union District Energy System as well as several businesses in the downtown area. So what’s the big deal? Simply this: Ground source heat pumps that are supplied with constant temperature water are among the most efficient ways of heating and cooling buildings available.

Air source heat pumps have to be engineered to work across a wide range of temperatures, but ground source equipment can be made more efficient because the temperature of the input water never varies. Not only that, heat pumps for a ground source system have a useful life of about 24 years — nearly triple that of air source equipment. In addition, the piping is utility grade, with a service life of 80 years or more.

The geothermal heating and cooling equipment runs on electricity, not oil, methane, or propane. Because ground source heat pumps are so efficient, the cost of heating or cooling is typically about half what it would be otherwise. Being kind to the environment is always a wonderful thing, but saving money is what motivates people to act.

A Series Of Happy Coincidences

In the case of West Union, several factors came together at just the right time to make the idea of a geothermal system a reality. In 2012, it was ready to embark on a major project to replace its streets in the downtown area. At the same time, the Iowa Economic Development Authority was interested in funding sustainable pilot projects in towns across the state and brought experts to West Union to discuss various options with residents.

Geothermal heating and cooling was just one of several sustainability projects that West Union completed more than a dozen years ago as part of a revitalization project that included a complete reconstruction of its downtown streets. Other initiatives included replacing the existing asphalt with porous pavement that lets water seep into the ground and rain gardens that slow and filter stormwater runoff.

“We just basically brainstormed ideas, even if they were off the wall and seemed ridiculous,” Jon Biederman, a civil engineer who was part of the town’s redevelopment planning team, told Inside Climate News. “Some of those were taken off the table right away, but one that kind of hung on was geothermal.”

Biederman and other local residents were familiar with small-scale geothermal energy systems like the one that provided heating and cooling for the local high school’s performing arts. During the brainstorming sessions, someone mentioned a much larger thermal energy network in Holland, Michigan, that used waste heat from a nearby power plant to melt snow and ice on city streets and sidewalks.

Even though there is no local power plant near West Union, the residents decided to pursue geothermal on a similar scale to provide heating and cooling to the town’s business district. The decision was made easier in part by plans to rip up and replace most of the streets downtown. With the ground already exposed, it would be less costly and disruptive to bury water pipes connecting the borefield to nearby buildings.

The town was able to secure state and federal grants driven by stimulus funding following the Great Recession of 2008. Those grants covered the majority of the road rebuilding project and the entire cost of the $2.2 million geothermal system. “The timing was just right for making the geothermal happen,” Biederman said. “I don’t know that it would have ever happened before that, or probably since. It was just absolutely perfect for timing.”

For the buildings connected to the system, the savings are significant. Biederman estimates his engineering firm saves a few hundred dollars a month with geothermal energy compared to what they would otherwise pay today if they kept their prior heating and cooling systems.

Steve Fate, the chairman of the West Union Community Library Board and the president of West Union District Energy, which oversees the geothermal network, said heating and cooling costs for the library have dropped by 25 percent since the system was completed. Pat Dillon, a local attorney who connected his office to the geothermal network several years ago, saw his winter heating bill drop from $350 to $180 per month. “It provides consistent, nice heat in the wintertime, and it’s cool in the summertime,” Dillon said. “It’s meeting all of our objectives.”

In 2023, the US Department of Energy highlighted West Union as having one of the highest-performing geothermal networks among a small but growing number of similar systems in operation nationwide. “It’s sort of a celebrity among thermal energy networks because it was constructed very early,” said Jessica Silber-Byrne, the thermal energy networks research and communications manager for the Building Decarbonization Coalition, which advocates for eliminating the use of fossil fuels in buildings.

A Geothermal Learning Curve

Being one of the first communities in the US to have a municipal geothermal system, West Union did not have a body of knowledge to fall back on and needed to find solutions on its own to challenges. “There weren’t good examples to fall back on, like ‘How do we bill everybody? What does that look like?’” said Robin Bostrom, the former head of the West Union Chamber of Commerce’s Main Street program. “They had to kind of wade through that and figure it out.”

Users of the network formed their own limited liability corporation and hired a geothermal service provider to monitor and maintain the system. Initially, costs were high, and the savings from switching to geothermal were minimal. However, a new service provider hired in 2021 provided the same services at a fraction of the cost. The change has allowed the user group to reduce the amount they pay for thermal energy from $14 per ton of heating and cooling capacity in 2021 to $9 per ton today.

West Union officials expected the geothermal system would be a model for the nation, but initially, most of the calls they got were to ask about the permeable pavers used on the newly renovated streets. There was little interest in the geothermal system, Biederman said. That’s beginning to change. “We used to get a call every once in a while. Now it’s really consistent,” Fate said, noting a group recently visited from Vermont.

Hot water from thermal springs has been used in district heating systems in the US for 150 years, but the West Union network was the first ambient temperature system owned by a municipality, Silber-Byrne of the Building Decarbonization Coalition told Inside Climate News.

There are now dozens of neighborhood-scale networks and district energy systems that tap geothermal energy for heating and cooling in operation in the United States, research from the organization indicates. Dozens of additional systems are currently under development.

Silber-Byrne said legislation that allows or requires utilities to install geothermal systems is partly responsible for the uptick in the heating and cooling networks. Twelve states, including those on the West Coast, Midwest, and Northeast as well as Colorado and Texas, have passed laws related to geothermal heating and cooling in recent years. Tax incentives introduced during the Biden administration have mostly been preserved in the One Big Beautiful Bill and are driving interest in the networks, Silber-Byrne said.

Fear Of The Unknown

While the West Union system was financed entirely by federal grants, some in the community were initially opposed to getting involved in a system that, at the time, was very much an unknown quantity. “It was years ahead of its time,” said Larry Leliefeld, former president of the Iowa Geothermal Association, and the current service provider for the West Union geothermal system. “What it lacked was bringing [people] along and helping them understand it. Either they didn’t have the information they needed, or they were afraid, or we didn’t communicate well enough from the start,” said Dick Woodard, a retired insurance agent who has owned two buildings connected to the system. “It’s kind of like church. If you want to change the hymns, then you are going to have somebody squawking about it. That’s the way it was here. You get past it.”