09/23/2026
America's geothermal frontier has advanced to its most unexpected location — beneath the streets of New York City, where Dandelion Energy has deployed closed-loop geothermal heat pump systems in 5,000 New York homes, eliminating natural gas heating from one of the densest urban environments in the world using the steady 12-degree Celsius temperature that exists 6 metres below Manhattan's surface.
Ground-source heat pumps — which extract heat from the Earth using a closed loop of fluid circulating through boreholes — are fundamentally different from the deep geothermal that generates electricity. They operate at the near-surface temperature that the Earth maintains year-round regardless of volcanic activity — 10 to 14 degrees Celsius across most of the continental United States — and amplify this modest heat resource through the coefficient of performance advantage that heat pumps achieve over direct electric resistance heating.
Dandelion Energy's New York programme uses a proprietary vertical borehole drilling system developed from water well drilling technology, capable of installing a 150-metre closed-loop borehole in a typical New York City residential lot in 6 hours — fast enough to complete residential heating system replacement in a single working day. The speed of installation, and the adaptation of the drilling system for the confined access of urban residential properties, has made urban geothermal heat pumps commercially viable in New York for the first time.
The 5,000 installed systems have collectively eliminated 2,500 tonnes of natural gas heating consumption annually — measurable in the gas distribution data of Con Edison's residential network, which shows declining natural gas consumption in zip codes where Dandelion has achieved significant market pe*******on.
Source: Dandelion Energy / New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), 2024
