Cutting Building Energy Use by a Third, One Neighborhood at a Time
What if the buildings in a neighborhood could share their heat the way a carpool shares a ride, essentially dropping off what one doesn't need right where another can use it?
That's the idea behind a Thermal Microgrid, and it's the subject of a recent paper that has won the . The paper, "From Theory to Practice: Feasibility Study of a Thermal Microgrid at a US DoD Installation," was led by RASEI Fellow in collaboration with researchers at the National Laboratory of the Rockies and the US Army Corps of Engineers Construction Engineering Research Laboratory. It was presented at the
How it works
A Thermal Microgrid is, at its core, a network of pipes carrying water at near-ambient temperature between buildings. Instead of every building running its own heating and cooling systems in isolation, each connected building gets a compact, efficient water-source heat pump in place of conventional HVAC equipment. A building that needs to shed heat, such as like a gym, a data center, or a kitchen, can pass that heat directly to a neighboring building that needs it, rather than rejecting it to the outside air and then burning more energy somewhere else to make heat from scratch.
The result, according to the study: a 31% reduction in source energy use, roughly a third less energy consumed to heat and cool the same set of buildings.Ìý
Why a military base, and why it matters beyond one
The study specifically models feasibility at a US Department of Defense installation. Military bases are effectively self-contained microgrids already, with their own generation, distribution, and a mandate for energy resilience and security that goes beyond simple cost savings. Demonstrating a Thermal Microgrid on a base means proving it somewhere the stakes for reliability are highest, and where the case for reducing energy demand ties directly to operational security, not just utility bills.
The implications reach well past DoD. The same logic applies to any dense cluster of buildings with mismatched heating and cooling needs, such as , hospital complexes, and commercial building districts.
The data center connection
A current application of this concept is with data centers, which are drawing an increasing share of national attention, and national grid capacity, for their energy demand. Data centers generate enormous, near-constant waste heat as a byproduct of computing. Rather than treating that heat purely as a cooling problem to be discarded, a Thermal Microgrid offers a way to treat it as a resource: piping it to nearby buildings that need warmth, and cutting the total energy draw of the district as a whole. As data center construction increases, pairing new facilities with thermal-sharing infrastructure could turn one of the grid's fastest-growing loads into a source of heating for its neighbors.
Why now?
This year's record-breaking summer temperatures have pushed cooling demand, and grid strain, to new highs in many parts of the country. A 31% reduction in source energy use at the building-district scale is exactly the kind of solution that eases pressure on the grid during peak demand, while lowering costs for the buildings involved.
Congratulations to the whole team on this recognition!