Nikki Bruno says geothermal energy is giving one Massachusetts city a fossil-free future.
Nikki Bruno learned early in her career that debates over climate change – and how to respond – are seldom black and white. Progress comes from honest discourse and collaboration.
At Eversource, where she leads the utility's thermal solutions and operational services, Nikki manages a geothermal project that has brought together environmental activists, the utility’s gas infrastructure team, ratepayers, and government leaders in Framingham, Mass. The result is the first utility-led geothermal network in the country, which came online in 2024.
This week on With Great Power, Nikki Bruno describes how the gas and electric utility Eversource uses geothermal energy to power 140 homes and businesses. She talks about challenges and successes of the project, how Eversource is now expanding it with Energy Department funding, and how the utility is measuring success.
Credits: Hosted by Brad Langley. Produced by Mary Catherine O’Connor. Edited by Anne Bailey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and Brad Langley.
Brad Langley: In the early 2000s, Nikki Bruno was studying environmental science at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
Nikki Bruno: I was one of the first full graduates of that program at Trinity.
Brad Langley: She was interested in water quality, specifically toxicology and water systems, and while she was working on her thesis, a proposed liquefied natural gas project in nearby Long Island Sound was sparking a lot of debate. Shell and the Canadian Natural Gas Company behind the proposal were arguing that it could replace dirtier imports.
Clip: The region right now is being fueled by fuel oil, which is imported, and coal, which is also imported.
Brad Langley: But the floating terminal called Broadwater faced stiff opposition from Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups.
And in 2008, despite clearing some regulatory hurdles, the project died. Then New York Governor David Paterson made the announcement.
David Paterson recording: We cannot let this issue go forward. It is not what Long Island Sound needs.
Brad Langley: Nikki remembers that at the time debate around Broadwater was seeping into her classrooms at Trinity.
Nikki Bruno: We had a professor who, to her credit, brought in both sides of the debate, a pro and a con. As environmental students at the time, we really sided with the environmentalist group that was in, saying, “of course, we don't want that.”
Brad Langley: In hindsight, Nikki says she might have judged the project a little unfairly.
Nikki Bruno: And now looking back, I realize I probably didn't understand what that project brought to bear.
Brad Langley: It's not that Nikki wishes the project had happened. She just sees now that she didn't approach it with an open mind.
Nikki Bruno: At the time, I really didn't appreciate all the nuances and the complexities that it's really more gray than black and white.
Brad Langley: Two years before the Broadwater project died, Nikki was putting her toxicology and analytics training to good use at an environmental consulting firm.
Nikki Bruno: So it was nice to use those analytical skills and have that kind of scientific discipline, I guess, when going about saying, okay, how can we solve for a problem that any one of our clients might have?
Brad Langley: One of those clients was the energy infrastructure company, Spectra Energy. Nikki worked on the environmental planning projects for gas pipelines for the company. It might not seem like the most riveting work, but it opened a lot of doors for her.
Nikki Bruno: Nine months later or so, I got hired on because I loved it so much. I learned quite a bit and there was this unique mentoring that I got from a lot of colleagues who were older and more seasoned in their career.
Brad Langley: She joined Spectra as an environmental project manager, a job that led to a number of other management roles. Nikki stayed with the firm for almost 12 years, all the way through Spectra's merger with Enbridge. Then in 2020, she joined Eversource to lead decarbonization work for the gas side of the utility. It was a role that combined her natural gas expertise with her interest in clean energy.
Nikki Bruno: A lot of folks feel like it's an either-or when it comes to clean energy. You're fossil or you're clean. And I don't like to think that way. I think there's a lot of great skill sets and experiences that you can have in either jurisdiction to bring projects to fruition, and it's so needed.
Brad Langley: In the five years since Nikki started at Eversource, she's risen to a VP level position where she's responsible for leading the utility's thermal solutions and operational services.
Nikki Bruno: I have the responsibility and the pleasure really of investigating decarbonization for the natural gas side of Eversource's business, and really what that means is developing and deploying emission-reducing or elimination type of technologies.
Brad Langley: Geothermal is one of those technologies. Using drilling expertise from the oil and gas industry as well as renewable energy skillsets, Eversource deployed a geothermal system in a suburb of Boston in 2024.
Nikki Bruno: What we have in Framingham is really a first-in-the-nation networked geothermal system.
Brad Langley: It also combines the work of an environmental nonprofit, in this case an organization called the Home Energy Efficiency Team or HEET, with the business goals of a utility.
Nikki Bruno: There was increasing pressure from environmental advocates to try something decarbonized, to do something different.
Brad Langley: It all started back in 2017 when HEET pitched the idea of using geothermal to tie buildings into a central heating and cooling system that could reduce carbon emissions by up to 60%. Eversource saw the potential and proposed what became their Framingham pilot in a 2020 gas rate case. It was an unusual partnership for Eversource, but it proved that progress happens even in the spaces between business and advocacy. And today the system is expanding thanks to what might seem like the oddest bedfellow of all, the federal government.
Nikki Bruno: We're actually working on an expansion of the pilot where HEET is the lead grant applicant to the Department of Energy. So really exciting to continue that partnership and really take it up a notch.
Brad Langley: This is With Great Power, a show about the people building the future grid. Today, I'm Brad Langley. Some people say utilities are slow to change, that they don't innovate fast enough, and while it might not always seem like the most cutting edge industry, there are lots of really smart people working really hard to make the grid cleaner, more reliable and customer centric.
Today my guest is Nikki Bruno, vice president of Thermal Solutions and Operational Services at Eversource. We talk about some of the challenges and successes of the geothermal project to date, how Eversource customers are responding and how the utility is measuring success. But first I asked Nikki to explain how the system works.
Nikki Bruno: We have a single pipe in about a square-mile loop connecting about 140 customers, roughly 36 buildings. Some are residential duplexes, apartment style buildings, single families. Some are small businesses, and so that loop is connected to three bore fields, a pump house, which is really like the brain of the entire system, and it circulates water-based fluid that heats and cools those homes and businesses.
Eversource owns, operates and maintains the pilot. HEET has been a very avid advocate for network geothermal systems and the technology in general, and I think we've learned quite a bit from them with our own knowledge about interacting with communities and running stakeholder engagements. And they've been great partners and in fact, HEET actually won a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, which is the quasi nonprofit in the state to track and measure some of the data in our bore field.
Brad Langley: When it comes to recruitment in the pilot, how receptive are people to geothermal at first blush? Does it take a lot of convincing of the value or are people pretty excited from the get-go to participate?
Nikki Bruno: It's interesting to me because for technology that's been around for quite a while, a lot of folks don't know about geothermal. So we really had to have our folks go into people's homes and businesses and not only explain the tenets of the pilot, but also the technology. Some folks were really enticed by the fact that they would get air conditioning. Many folks didn't have it in the neighborhood. Others and many were excited because they didn't have to pay for any of the upfront capital improvements at their home or business. But we know that's not a sustainable model. I think what we were doing there is for this first go, you really have to indemnify and [unclear] folks to join. And so we thought by taking on that work and the ownership of those assets where we traditionally didn't would really help folks get comfortable with the fact like the utility is here for us. We know they're trying something and we hope everything goes great, and if it doesn't, we know they're there for us.
Brad Langley: So vis-à-vis other types of pilots like this, what are the key or novel elements of this pilot and how is it similar or different from other geothermal systems elsewhere, like one in Boise?
Nikki Bruno: Sure. So I mean the prime difference for me is that the utility owns this. And so really the impetus behind that is we have unique financing options over long periods of time to spread costs. We have the ability to take on CapEx and deploy it at scale, if you will. And so right now, I mean technically a private developer could come in and build some sort of network geothermal system, although the utility really does have those granted franchise rights in their public rights of way. So it's kind of parlaying all these wonderful things we already have in existence in a new way with this technology. So I think that's different, the fact that we as a utility are even doing it. I also think this is truly a neighborhood decarbonization concept, and to get a critical mass of folks to move forward with something is really, really difficult.
And I think this was not new construction, it wasn't a development. This was retro… e took the hardest first, it's a retrofit. We had every type of building it seemed on the loop to convert and each one was different. And so I think that is very unique as well. And the last thing I'll say is really about the community itself. And so between the mix of customers and stakeholders and the city of Framingham is somebody we've worked with in our electric and gas capacities before, and so we already had a relationship there. However, we told them going in, we know what we're doing, we're the utility, but this is something new for us. So if there are issues, there may be issues and here's how we want to approach it. And they have been a wonderful partner and getting that municipal support is really key. We found out even more than we thought. But that I think is very unique too because that's a piece I think that's often overlooked.
Brad Langley: So the customer experience and really building trust with customers because fundamentally changing the way they access power is fundamental. How did you guys focus on building that customer trust as you were rolling out this pilot?
Nikki Bruno: We had a very short window to build a lot of trust quickly, and we did that in a couple of different ways. Where we located the pilot, it was an environmental justice community and kind of by the definition here in Massachusetts, it qualified based on lower incomes and also English was not a first language. So what that meant for us was we really literally met the customers where they were. So we held open houses, office hours during construction, all right, in a walkable area to the neighborhood. We translated materials in the top three languages. We had folks on hand who could answer their questions in Spanish or Portuguese, that sort of thing, just so folks felt comfortable. And even how we interacted, like the different channels we use with the customer, paper copies are great, some people love paper. We also had email newsletters so folks could get a real short but very pertinent snapshot in their email, meeting people in person, having direct phone lines that they knew that they could get through to somebody. So we really started thinking about where are the pain points that we see? We have a unique opportunity to really change folks' hearts and minds here. How can we do better with this pilot because we know they'll need a more intensive customer experience?
Brad Langley: I want to come back to the funding you talked about because if I'm not mistaken, the project actually went dark for about seven months after the administration changed, but recently, DOE, their geothermal technologies office did award HEET $8.6 million to continue the initial phase. What specifically does this money unlock going forward?
Nikki Bruno: Sure. And so I do want to just say just for clarity, this is for the expansion. So the pilot, we did the, I'll call it phase one, but our pilot was funded through our rate case and regulatory proceedings. This expansion is what the DOE is funding. And so in the department, there was a pause that I would call it a pause that they had taken, but we had under a prior administration received funding for the design phase. So what that meant was looking at prospective customer loads, building on the existing infrastructure we already had in the ground and saying, what else do we need to build to serve that load? Essentially we're looking at a doubling of the load. And so this next phase would really unlock actually installing the pipe, associated bores or any auxiliary pumps, anything needed to actually serve those customers as well as converting those buildings that we would potentially connect to the loop.
Brad Langley: And what were some of the success metrics of the pilot? How do you sit back and say, this thing worked, this is absolutely worth expanding?
Nikki Bruno: We're actually calculating all of that now, but I like to summarize it down into three main tenets. So we're obviously looking financially at how well the pilot does and what that means is the impact on customer bills, is it a positive or negative impact? Is it from a cost perspective to actually install that upfront – CapEx we know is high – but to actually install those assets, how did that go? Do we see ways where we could bring that down? We know this is the first iteration, so naturally we may not see as many economies of scale as we might going second, third, fourth. Secondly, emissions reductions. This is all about helping the state meet their emissions reduction targets and mandates. So are we actually reducing those emissions? So for a lot of folks who are coming over from oil, it's a slam dunk, right? Gas also reducing emissions.
We had some electric resistance customers actually, which that's an interesting story in and of itself from a usage perspective, but we're measuring end use. How are we contributing to those reductions? And then lastly, customer satisfaction. And this is probably my favorite because this is where it gets really gray. I talked about complexity. Some folks are jazzed, they have air conditioning, some folks are happy, they have a more stable bill, potentially. It really depends. And so how are we looking at measuring that? We're looking at is the service provided on the coldest and warmest days and every day in between to a point where the customer is comfortable for the most part? And if not, why not? And is it something we can rectify easily or is it more of a chronic issue? So we're measuring customer satisfaction. We actually have a third party monitoring firm who's helping us with that, kind of an unbiased look as well in addition to the data we're collecting.
Brad Langley: And walk me through the economics of the pilot and how this type of system would work on a commercial deployment funding from a government agency.
Nikki Bruno: So the commercial, I'll call it attributes of a pilot like this are actually, that's what we're trying to figure out, right? Our next step, we've proposed a new construction filing this past fall to kind of attack that new development where you don't have the retrofit, you don't have the preexisting conditions on the customer side to work through, which are very costly, probably the most expensive part of our pilot from our data. And there are some synergies that we see every day on the gas side where somebody, the contractor is digging a trench, they're putting in other utilities, right? So we can piggyback on those savings, those economies of scale. But I don't know that we've gotten to the full point of maturity yet to say we are completely off subsidies for a service like this. That's what we'd like to work towards and why we need to continue doing more of these pilots to get those numbers in hand. But we are thinking about everything from procurement, how we set up our bids to reduce pricing, how do we work with existing suppliers and existing contractors to deliver services slightly different. So we're looking at different strategies from the procurement side all the way to the execution side to see how we can bring down cost. And we're seeing some of those cost reductions already, even in the design phase of this next expansion.
Brad Langley: Geothermal is one of the rare forms of renewable energy that the current administration is throwing its support behind. Do you think that support will continue through future administrations?
Nikki Bruno: I'm optimistic the support will continue from the federal government, especially if we get some of these projects executed and we can provide data to stand behind. It's really unique because somebody actually, I think it was the HEET team, Zeyneb had said the dig safe color, the color we used to mark the roads with for the geothermal pilot is purple. And then she made a bipartisan joke about blue and red being purple. I did not plan that. But what I will say is I think we're trying to see geo from all angles, which is what a bipartisan look should do. So you're looking at it economically, making sure it makes sense for customers and their wallets from a usage perspective, making sure it actually serves the need of those customers. And then from an environmental perspective, is it something that is sustainable in all senses of the word? And there's all sorts of things with workforce building and developing that or transitioning folks to that. I mean, there's exciting things there I think as well. So I am cautiously optimistic that it will continue.
Brad Langley: And as we think about network geothermal specifically, what has to happen for network geothermal to expand across US utilities more broadly?
Nikki Bruno: But I think a couple of things have to happen. We've had great support from the regulatory front. I think utilities are generally speaking mature businesses that like that security and routine and that path to cost recovery, that surety really gives them the ability to deploy their capital efficiently. So if you have a strong regulatory support body, that is key and that can manifest in a couple of different ways. We're actually, since our pilot has gone forward, we've seen a collaborative of utilities. We were a part of it, join up, talk about lessons learned. We've contributed a lot to that. And folks have taken on legislative avenues to get through to their first pilot. Some have gone through the regulatory forums, rate cases like we did. So there's all different ways to do it, I think, but you need to have that strong regulatory or governmental support. Lastly, and most importantly, the economics of it all, right? I think with the tax codes changing with some of the administration changes, you're trying to basically bulletproof this technology so you can send the marketplace good commercial signals because ultimately that's what's going to drive prices down, costs down. And we need to consider that in the context of the pace of this all for deployment.
Brad Langley: We call this show With Great Power, which is a nod to the energy industry. It's also a famous Spider-Man quote. With great power comes great responsibility. So Nikki, tell me, what superpower do you bring to the energy transition?
Nikki Bruno: I truly believe my superpower is bringing teams together because I love people probably to a fault. I'm an extrovert, but through my entire professional and personal career, I've just tried to make working fun. And I'll give you a quick anecdote if I may, but I was probably a little bit above mediocre athlete, but I was on these incredible teams my entire life. And it gives you a complex after a while because you're thinking, oh God, I'm really not that good. But I ended up running in college for my college team and every team I seemed to step on won something incredible. And I can tell you for a fact, I was not the one racing that best time or coming in first. But I sat with my coach one day and he was a great blue collar guy, and he kind of was like, Nikki, I wish I could put your heart into somebody else's body. And I said, oh, that's the best backhanded compliment I've gotten all week coach. But it's true. And I think there's something to be said for maybe what some folks, especially technical folks, may consider a softer quality, but to me it's a really important leadership quality. So the ability to work together and motivate a team, especially I think about the utility, a creature of habit to do something new like this has been really rewarding. I try to bring that as much as possible every day.
Brad Langley: Awesome, Nikki. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate your time.
Nikki Bruno: Thank you for the opportunity to chat with you all.
Brad Langley: Nikki Bruno is vice president of Thermal Solutions and Operational Services at Eversource. With Great Power is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. Delivering on our clean energy future is complex. GridX exists to simplify the journey. GridX is the enterprise rate platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future. We design and implement emerging rate structures and we increase consumer investment in clean energy all while managing the complex billing needs of a distributed grid.
Mary Catherine O'Connor produced the show, and Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. Sean Marquand composed the original theme song and mixed the show. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and me, Brad Langley. If this show is providing value for you and we really hope it is, we'd love it if you could help us spread the word. You can rate or review us on Apple and Spotify, or you can share a link with a friend, colleague, or the energy nerd in your life. As always, thanks for listening. I'm Brad Langley.