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Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

HVAC geo scales up. You could do a neighborhood utility and homes can heat/cool for the cost of air circ. You'll wind up with a novelty, an HOA that benefits every home (fees for for power/maint pumps).

A couple of generations ago, we had neighborhood sewage utilities all around here. Neighborhood geo seems less complex than that.

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This was tried using money for 2010 olympics in Whistler BC as the athlete accommodation was sold as subsidized housing to local workers after the olympics. The geothermal district heating project had many ongoing issues with repair costs being borne collectively by the new owners. Some saved $150/mo by removing it and switching to electric [0]

0: https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/opinion/letter-to-the-edit...

I appreciate the info. I'll give it a read.

There are probably a dozen articles on the issues in that pique news paper spanning a decade. Lots of finger pointing between the parties responsible for the design, installation and maintenance. The Vocal group of owners got bailed out by the local government at one point but it didn’t resolve the ongoing issues.

Not to say the technology is hopeless, just in this instance it wasn’t done properly so maybe it isn’t as easy as people think.

There are some places (e.g. https://heet.org/geo/) that are looking at neighborhood "geothermal" - basically using ground temperature as a heat reservoir for heat pumps. They're getting buy-in from natural gas utilities, some of whom see it as a way to keep using their capital, rights of way, and expertise in digging holes in the ground (and maybe in billing folks, too) to keep making money as households convert to heat pumps.

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