SandBoxBlogs: Grand Junction Daily Sentinel "Geothermal system cuts university’s bill $300,000 each year"

Matthew Berger:
"About 3 feet below Delta Field, between the Fine Arts Building and Wubben Hall, is an underground field of looping pipes, spaced 25 feet apart and extending 50 feet into the Earth’s crust.

This is one of four drill fields on the Colorado Mesa University campus, distributing geo-exchange energy to seven buildings in the southern part of campus.

The system reduces the university’s costs by almost $300,000 a year, according to facilities director Kent Marsh. He hopes to expand it to reach more buildings in the coming years, if the funding is there.

“The question we have to answer is: What’s the payback?” he said during a recent interview in his office.
For now, though, he is content with the fact the system is exceeding expectations.

“What we’ve found so far is that the system is behaving as it should, even though we have two more buildings on it than we should,” Marsh said.

The key is the 234,000 feet of eight-inch pipe connecting the underground loops with the buildings..."
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