THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

Last month, after years of prodding, state regulators approved a $16 million project that Magavi and Schulman proposed to demonstrate that there's a financially viable, technically sound way to heat and cool the vast majority of the state's homes and businesses without fossil fuels. The project uses linked heat pumps and subterranean pipes that can harness steady underground temperatures to heat and cool buildings.

That project, which will be installed by National Grid, follows the state's approval of a similar geothermal project -- also based on their ideas -- proposed by Eversource, which plans to spend $10 million starting this year to connect about 100 homes and businesses in Framingham with a network of ground-source heat pumps.

If both projects work -- heating and cooling air at reasonable costs -- Magavi and Schulman hope the utilities will stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year replacing their aging system of gas pipes, and instead direct that money to installing geothermal energy throughout the region. Eventually, they believe, such emissions-free systems could replace the need for gas and oil in most homes.

The plan, Magavi and Schulman say, will also save state residents money in the long run. Every ratepayer dollar spent on investing in the utilities' thousands of miles of gas pipes, which leak substantial amounts of methane that contributes disproportionately to global warming, will likely saddle future generations with unnecessary debt for what will largely become useless infrastructure as the state moves away from fossil fuels.

State law now requires emissions in Massachusetts to be reduced 50 percent below 1990 levels by the end of the decade and effectively eliminated by 2050. That means utilities must find new ways of heating and cooling buildings, which are among the largest sources of greenhouse gases. The sooner they stop investing in oil and gas, the more the utilities can spend on clean energy.

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