The Most Complete List of Commercial Geothermal Cost Data

This is a list of the best resources I’ve been able to find for commercial and public geothermal projects. We need to be creating more case studies in order to reduce risk for property owners. By showing property owners, specifically large property owners how many systems have been put in, it will be easier to sell the technology.

Lately, I’ve been searching for geothermal case studies for commercial and public projects. I’ve searched the internet and connected with all of our instructors and friends to try and find the best data I can. The trick is that I’m really not interested in the technical details of the projects, I want to be able to dig deep into the economics of the projects.

Here is the best information I’ve been able to find. I’ll be adding to this list as I find more resources and I’ll be working on some analysis in the future.

1. Dr. Steve Kavanaugh has a very in depth spread sheet available on his website that was last updated in September 2011. You can see a screen shot below. You can download the excel spreadsheet here.

2. Dr. Kavanaugh has also published some amazing articles on ASHRAE on long term geothermal heat pump performance with articles on ground loops performance, installation costs, etc. The below screen shot is from his article on geothermal installation costs for public and commercial applications. You can see all of Dr. Kavanaughs’ articles here. 

3. Geoexchange case studies. Geoexchange has a body of commercial case studies. The majority of these are written more then a decade ago. However, they’re still very useful and well written.

4. MEP Associates has some basic data on the large university geothermal projects that they have engineered. You can read more about their projects here. 

5. Project Specific Case Studies. Below some of the project specific case studies I’ve been able to find in my search.