Scaling up geothermal across the nation is already plausible because of the ubiquity of companies like Capital Well, all of which have a strong need to get into this new and potentially immense market. Their current businesses are squeezed by mounting competition. They need to put their existing assets, both tangible and intangible, to new and more lucrative uses.
Nor is the technology fit only for residential buildings. There may be an even bigger market for medium-size commercial buildings that can afford to drive the heat pump with hybrid solar power mounted on the roof. Bob Grappone, owner of one of the state's biggest auto groups, retrofit one of his dealerships near Concord. Dartmouth College, in Hanover, has a geothermal system. So does the New Hampshire Institute of Art. And this is the market space where Capital Well is dreaming. "We are not quite set up for it now," Dan Grace says. "We have to qualify crews in commercial geothermal, a separate, specialized division. But if we see geothermal grow the way it is now, we can ramp up for it. That's where green really matters, too. I don't know if climate change is cyclical, but the big factories running on coal and gas—like in China—are putting more carbon in the atmosphere than our cars. And we want to cut down on imported oil so there will be more gas for our cars."
New Hampshire is a good test for the technology, because the winters are so harsh. If ground-source heat pumps can work here, they can work anywhere. But the farther south you go, the more exciting the efficiencies of geothermal become. The ground in New Jersey, for example, averages about 55 degrees. North Carolina, where the ground temperature is about 60 degrees, is a kind of reverse of New Hampshire, with long, humid summers, which require full-time air conditioning.
Terry Swain grew up in the Lakes Region. He went to trade school, skipped college (his daughter, Lizy, is definitely not skipping it), and went to work building post-and-beam houses. Around 1980, his brother-in-law, Mike Dragon, got him a job on a well rig, and it was love at first sight. ("This was so rewarding, because the end product was so wonderful: I was bringing fresh water to your family.") The two finally started their own business, Capital Well, in 1986, and slowly built it to local prominence. The three Dragon boys and Dan Grace went to primary school together in Warner, then the brothers worked at Capital Well in a school-to-work program while still at Kearsarge Regional High School. Grace joined the brothers at the company right after graduation. The four young men hope to stick together and split equally whatever stake they get in the business.
They want to build on what Swain and Mike Dragon are bequeathing them, develop a regional brand (their first local television ads will air this year), enlarge the fleet, offer end-to-end service—water production and purification, geothermal heating and cooling—something of their own. "It's exciting to think they are building their futures," Swain says, speaking of the push into geothermal. "This is their generation's growth; since 2008, it is 10 times what it was."
Swain meets with the four aspiring future partners every Tuesday morning to go over the past week's jobs and analyze the business (not just the technical) side of how things might be improved. "Uncle Terry is always watching over us, to make sure that we understand how to improve, how to make money, and what to watch out for," says Greg. "He goes over the figures, where we're at, costs in every category, excavation to drilling pumps, warranty calls, all in pie charts. He is teaching us: The books are open." Grace—"not a brother, technically"—has been tasked with spearheading the geothermal strategy. He is equally humbled. "Of the 250 wells we drilled last year, 50 were for geothermal heating," he told me. "I am living and breathing this opportunity."
The maturing of the geothermal industry has depended on the refinement of specialized components—compressors, heat exchangers, variable-speed-drive water pumps, smart regulators, grouters, etc.—that have to be produced in scale and distributed by advanced marketing networks. Ten years ago, small companies like Capital Well would not have had reliable and cost-efficient heat pumps to install. Many makers of engineered products have since gotten into the business: Bosch, Mitsubishi, Swedish and Chinese companies you haven't heard of, Carrier in the U.S., and also some smaller American companies, including Econar, based in Minnesota; WaterFurnace, in Indiana; and Advanced Geothermal Technology, in Pennsylvania.
All are assembling components from global supplier networks and designing heat pumps for local markets, much the way auto companies do. Eventually, a few will emerge as dominant world players, scaling up and cheapening the cost of the hardware considerably. Already, Bosch is advertising on television and Carrier on the Web. "We want great working relationships with the best supplier companies," Grace says, "and that doesn't mean the cheapest."
But Capital Well's dreams are grounded also in its younger people mastering technologies of a different kind, the ordinary peer-to-peer network technologies we take for granted by now but that allow them to coordinate efficiently among themselves and with contracting partners. Capital Well would not have survived to position itself for the new era if these young people had not been able to win bid after bid for new wells during hard times. And that has meant the sales force scheduling the equipment and communicating with subcontractors in what often seems a seamless, open conversation, so that everybody knows where each rig and van and person is at any hour—and exactly where to go next.
