Geothermal Isn’t Just HVAC. It’s Grid Infrastructure

What if one of the biggest climate problems in our buildings isn’t power generation, but the fact we’re still burning fuel in the basement?

In this episode, I’m joined by Dan Yates, CEO of Dandelion Energy, to unpack why geothermal may be one of the most overlooked tools in climate tech today, and why building decarbonisation deserves far more attention in the wider energy transition debate. If we’re serious about net zero and real emissions reduction, we need to stop treating heating as a side issue. 

Dan lays out a blunt truth: heating and cooling account for the vast majority of emissions from buildings, yet much of the conversation still fixates on EVs, solar, and batteries. You’ll hear why some forms of electrification can create a nasty unintended consequence by driving winter peak demand through the roof, and why geothermal flips that logic on its head. We dig into how ground-source systems can cut energy use, slash peak load, and potentially reduce the need for expensive new grid infrastructure. 

You might be shocked to learn that this isn’t just an HVAC story. It’s a grid story. A policy story. A housing story. We also get into cost, leasing, incentives, data, and why Dan believes geothermal should be seen as distributed infrastructure hiding in plain sight. If you want a clearer view of what practical climate action looks like beyond the usual talking points, this one’s worth your time. 

🎙️ Listen now to hear how Dan Yates and Dandelion Energy are pushing a smarter, more strategic path to decarbonisation.

Sign up to Climate Confident+ for deep dive analysis of the major climate and energy stories of the day.

Transcript

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Dan Yates: 0:03

Almost every building in the world is heated by a fire in the basement. And whether you're burning natural gas or you're burning propane, or you're burning, if you can, believe it or not, there's still 10 million homes in the US that burn either propane or heating oil, literally a tank of gasoline in the yard that heats the house. But whichever one you're burning, it's 80% of the emissions in buildings is heating and cooling.

Tom Raftery: 0:33

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 264 of the Climate Confident Podcast. My name is Tom Raftery. Before we start a quick update. Up until now, Climate Confident+ subscribers had exclusive access to the full back catalogue of more than 260 episodes, while everybody else could hear just the most recent 30 days. As of yesterday, that changes. The full back catalogue is now open to everyone. Climate Confident+ now shifts to something new. Subscribers will get premium and bonus episodes, which I'll be publishing roughly twice a month with extra analysis, added insight and commentary on the practical realities of the transition. Subscriptions start at five euros a month, and that support helps me keep producing Climate Confident as a space for serious conversations about climate solutions, emissions reduction, clean energy, and what it actually takes to decarbonise at speed. Now on to today's episode. We spent a lot of time talking about electrification as if it starts and ends with EVs, solar panels, and batteries. But one of the biggest climate problems is sitting much closer to home, literally in basements, utility rooms, and back gardens around the world. We are still burning stuff to keep buildings warm and treating that as normal. It isn't normal. It's expensive, inefficient, polluting, and in many cases absurdly outdated. Heating and cooling account for the vast majority of emissions from buildings. Yet they rarely get the same attention as transport or power. Worse, some of the solutions being pushed at scale can create their own problems if they drive winter peak demand through the roof. My guest today is Dan Yates, CEO of Dandelion Energy, a company focused on geothermal heating and cooling for homes and multifamily buildings. In this episode, we talk about why geothermal may be one of the most overlooked tools in building decarbonisation and why Dan argues it should be seen not just as a better HVAC system, but as a form of distributed grid infrastructure. We discussed the dirty little secret of conventional heating electrification, why peak load may become the real bottleneck in the transition, and why reducing demand at the building level could be smarter, faster, and cheaper than endlessly building out more network infrastructure. We also get into the economics why geothermal has historically been far too expensive, what Dandelion is doing to bring those costs down, how leasing could radically change adoption, and why utilities and policymakers may need to stop thinking about heating as a side issue and start treating it as a strategic one. If you care about clean energy, building decarbonisation, grid resilience or the less glamorous systems that will make or break the energy transition, this is a conversation worth hearing. Dan, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Dan Yates: 3:56

Tom, yeah, great to be here. I'm Dan Yates. I'm the CEO of Dandelion Energy.

Tom Raftery: 4:01

Okay, Dan, and what is Dandelion Energy?

Dan Yates: 4:06

Yeah. So, we are the leading US geothermal heating and cooling company. We focus on residential through mid-size multi-family buildings and we help large scale production builders to put geothermal systems into their new homes.

Tom Raftery: 4:25

Okay, and why? As in what made you wake up one morning and say to yourself, I know I will set up a geothermal company.

Dan Yates: 4:37

Yeah, so, we're all really aware of the transition of, vehicles going from fossil fuel burning engine powered conventional cars to electric cars,

Tom Raftery: 4:49

Yep.

Dan Yates: 4:50

and we're aware of how there's huge companies, now that have been founded on the basis of that. And there's been maybe a lull recently in, in the uptake of EVs in the US globally, there's been no lull. And it's our grandkids if they're driving a car at all.'cause it may be driven by a robot. They'll be driving an electric car. The same thing is afoot with heat. It's just not getting the same amount of attention. Almost every building in the world is heated by a fire in the basement. And whether you're burning natural gas or you're burning propane, or you're burning, if you can, believe it or not, there's still 10 million homes in the US that burn either propane or heating oil, literally a tank of gasoline in the yard that heats the house. But whichever one you're burning, it's 80% of the emissions in buildings is heating and cooling. And it's dirty. It leads to carbon monoxide poisoning. And it's an inefficient and it's not where things are headed. What is happening and has been happening now over the last decade is an increasing regulatory and government push to electrify buildings, and a consumer interest in having, all electric homes. Geothermal is by far the best way to heat and cool a home with electricity. I can tell you more about how that works.

Tom Raftery: 6:15

Let's dive into that a little bit because I've talked a bit on the podcast before about the likes of heat pumps for heating and cooling of homes, but those are mostly air sourced, and what you're talking about is, if I'm understanding correctly, it's a ground sourced heat pump, essentially. Is that it?.

Dan Yates: 6:35

So, to build off exactly what you were saying, Tom, the most common way to heat a home with electricity is an air source heat pump, which is basically an air conditioner running in reverse. The way an air conditioner works is it's got a part of the system in the house and a part of the system out of the house, and it's running refrigerant between those two, parts outside of the house, the refrigerants gets compressed and is super hot, and you blow air over the refrigerant to cool it off, and that's the part of the system that's essentially pushing heat out of the house. Inside the house, the refrigerant is expanded and is super cool, and you're blowing air over the refrigerant to cool the air to cool the house. And that cycle continues. So from a layman's perspective, the air conditioner is making cold air. But there isn't actually, cold isn't a thing. Cold is just an absence of heat. From the physicist's perspective, what the air conditioner is doing is it's collecting heat in the house and pushing it outside, and it's shunting, it's moving heat out of the house. So that's how air conditioner works. The way a conventional air source heat pump works is it does that in the summer, and then it literally just flips a couple switches inside and it does the opposite in the winter. So instead of pushing heat outta the house, it's pulling heat from the outside into the house. The problem with an air source solution is that the world is working against the heat pump all year long. On the hottest day of the year. That's the day you're trying to push heat out of the house and the air that you're blowing over the refrigerant to cool it off is super hot.'cause it's a hot day. On the coldest day of the year, that's the day that you're trying to pull the most heat into the house. But there's no heat in the air on that day to pull enough heat into heat the house. So what happens is on the hot days, the systems. They work, but they just work less efficiently. On the cold days that delta and temperature is so great that they actually just don't really work. So what they do is they flip over to what's called a resistance coil, which is essentially it's effectively 10 hair dryers sitting in the inside part of the system that you blow air over, and it heats it up the same way that a hairdryer, blow dries your hair. So, that's very energy inefficient. It leads to very high bills. And so folks living in colder areas and cold isn't just Maine, and, Winnipeg. Cold is like, North Carolina, Washington, DC, Denver, even, Houston on a cold snap. Folks living in those areas will see very high bills during those cold periods because they're running their system in that blow dryer mode. That's sort of the dirty secret, unfortunately, of air source heat pumps and for an individual home buyer, they might be able to weather those bills, but for the grid it's becoming a big issue. And in fact, a lot of the utilities in states that have been pushing air source heat pumps are now on track to having their peak demand be winter peak because of these, mass blow dryer moments through the winter season. And that's gonna lead to billions of dollars of distribution and transmission line investment just to cover these peaks. So, enter geothermal. So what does geothermal do that's different? Well, instead of trying to exchange heat with the air, which is even on a good day, a pretty rotten medium for heat exchange 'cause it's obviously not very dense and consequently it doesn't hold a bunch of heat. We exchange heat with the earth. And the earth is a phenomenal medium for heat exchange for a couple reasons. First of all, it's essentially a thermal battery that stores the sun's heat year round. So we drill down as deep as 500 feet below the surface of the house and install what's called a ground loop, which is essentially two pipes that have been connected at the bottom with a U-shaped connector. We fill them with water and antifreeze and we can pump water down one of them, and it comes out the other. So we can circulate this water through the loop in the ground. And the whole point of it is just to expose that water to the earth's temperature. And in the top let's say the top 500 feet, the primary source of heat on the earth is not actually the mantle and the core. It's just the absorbed heat from the sun year round. So you get, I jokingly call it lukewarm geothermal because the ground temperature is like between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Which is not 300 degrees like people think about with the other kind of geothermal where you're powering a power plant, but it's plenty warm in the winter and it's plenty cool in the summer. And importantly, it stays the same temperature even on the hottest and coldest days. So what we do is we circulate water through this, pipe that's been buried in the ground. It absorbs the heat from the earth. We bring that into the house and we connect it up to our heat pump, which looks just like the inside part of a conventional air source heat pump. And then instead of exchanging heat with the outside air, we run that water through our system and we suck heat out of it in the wintertime, and we use it to heat the house and we pump heat into it in the summertime, and we use it to cool the house. The magic of a refrigerant loop is such that we can concentrate heat. People often ask, well if the, ground's only 60 degrees, are you gonna be able to get the house to the temperature I want. Yes, absolutely.'cause we take the heat out of the ground and then we concentrate it and it, the air that pumps through the house is actually well over a hundred degrees. And then, you know, you use that to bring the home to 75, 70, whatever, comfort level people want. That's all very fancy technology explanation. So why? The upshot is on an ongoing basis, the energy consumption is half that of a conventional air source heat pump, and on a peak day, it's a quarter of what you would get from an air source heat pump. So we completely remove the peak and we significantly reduce people's bills year round. I draw an analogy to induction stoves. So, why do I draw this analogy? 15 years ago when you said, I'm gonna move, this house is not gonna be running on natural gas, it's gonna be running on electricity. What people would picture is a crummy old electric resistance range. And they say, oh, that's such a bummer.'cause I love my gas stove. And electric resistance range is not as good as a gas stove. An air source heat pump is kind of like an electric resistance range. It's just not as good as gas heater from the consumer's perspective. The only thing it does better if you're running on a clean grid is it allows you to eventually transition to, an electric stove that's powered by renewable energy, which by the way, in the US we're not there yet. So even on that front, it's not beating gas today. But from a consumer function perspective on every other front, it's just worse. It you can't tune it as quickly. It takes a long time to heat up and cool down. Resistance ranges are not as good as gas ranges. Air source heat pumps are not as good as gas furnaces. They cost a lot more to operate and they don't work as well on the, coldest days of the year. Your gas furnace always works great. Geothermal is like an induction stove. So an induction stove is actually just on all accounts better than a gas range. It's easier to clean. It has even higher performance in terms of dialing it in perfectly. The range doesn't get hot because it, you're cooking with the magnets. I mean, it's a spectacular, mind-boggling technology, right? It's just actually better than gas, and the prices are coming down now that mere mortals are starting to put them in. Geothermal is the same kind of thing. Geothermal is on every front better than gas. You'll have the lowest bills you've ever had. It's clean. It's super reliable. The heat pumps actually last 25 to 30 years, and the ground loop lasts over a hundred years. It's like basically lasts the lifetime of the building. So it's as reliable or more reliable than a gas furnace. And then you have all the other benefits of being electric. You don't have to put carbon monoxide sensors in your house anymore because there is no risk of a gas leak. You have all the environmental benefits. So that's the stuff that is pushing this forward and making it what we see as an inevitable, component of this electric transition.

Tom Raftery: 14:55

A couple of things come outta that, I guess. First is if you are drilling 500 feet under the house. Does that mean it has a significantly higher CapEx than an air source heat pump, for example? And secondly, if you are significantly reducing the energy requirements of the house and reducing therefore the peak, is that something that local utilities should be interested in because you are reducing the peak for them.

Dan Yates: 15:31

Yes, I love, and thank you so much for pairing those questions together because in a way one answers the other. So, on the first question of, you know, CapEx or, in layman's terms, upfront cost, yes. This has been the sole and very significant, weak spot of geothermal historically has been that it's just been preposterously expensive to put in. And that is the mission of Dandelion is to get the cost down into mainstream geothermal. And we have been making great progress on that mission. And that's what's leading to our, rapid growth. If 10 years ago there was, first of all, almost nobody doing geothermal in new homes. One choice would be to look at getting it retrofitted into your house and there is a large and established but cottage industry of local installers across the country that do geothermal systems. And your typical quote will be 60 to $150,000, depending on the size of your house. And so, 1% of US homes have geothermal. There are mil a million geothermal installations in the US and there's tens of thousands bordering on hundreds of thousands going in every year. So it's like, it is a live and cooking. The systems are just rock solid. All the technology's proven. It's not a risky new thing, but at that price point, obviously, it's very similar to solar in like the 1980s where you had two categories. You had like the zealots who were like, I'll do it at any cost. And then you have rich people who are like, this is an interesting, and tech sort of technology technophiles who are like, this is an interesting thing I want to invest in and I can, I plant it on my home for 25 years and it'll pay back. And so I can justify it. So what we've worked on is getting that cost down, and we've done a number of things to bring it down to where our pricing now is in the sort of 20 to$30,000 range for a new home all in. Compared against what a conventional system will be in a new home, which would probably be, call it $5,000. So we have radically collapsed the upfront cost, and we're continuing to innovate and drive that cost even further down. And we have a number of it comes in our design of the systems, in our engineering, and actually in our, heat pump capabilities through our, existing partners. And then the second piece of it though is the second part of your question, which is wouldn't a utility be interested in this? And Yes. And wouldn't wouldn't a state government or a regional operator who is in charge of managing capacity, are they interested in this? And the answer is yes. And so what has happened in the last 10 years and it's continuing to happen like a, there's a steady drumbeat of progress to our benefit here is states have been rolling and the federal government have been rolling out incentives to offset the upfront cost. One of the few beneficiaries of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on the environmental front last summer,'cause it was, let's be clear, not an environmentally friendly bill,

Tom Raftery: 18:35

Nor was it, nor was it beautiful.

Dan Yates: 18:37

Yes. We, yeah, there we can make, we can, there's more to be said on that, on another podcast. But we were actually one of the beneficiaries because it was clarified that geothermal systems can be leased, and that has allowed us, and the commercial tax credit was preserved. And so we are now in a place we've launched a leasing offering in conjunction with one partner. And, and we're soon gonna have another partner on our platform where there's a 40% tax credit that comes right off the top for the install of these systems. So we get 40% from the, federal government when we do a lease system. And then at a state level, there are a number of different incentive structures. In some states like Colorado, there are large rebates directly from the utility that are in the tens of thousands of dollars. And in a number of states now, on the eastern seaboard, there's a program called G RECs, which are geothermal renewable energy credits. That can also total tens of thousands of dollars worth of value in terms of incentives. And so, if you take the math that I just gave you and the, the caveman math is essentially I've got about 10 to $20,000 that I've gotta reconcile for, to bridge this gap in a new home. What we're seeing is that in a lot of these states, the incentives actually pay for even in so many, in many cases, more than pay for that difference. And so it becomes a cost savings for these builders to put in the systems.

Tom Raftery: 20:02

Okay. And is it exclusively new homes or could people retrofit it to their existing homes?

Dan Yates: 20:35

It's both. What we've chosen to do as a company, and we've, we made this decision almost three years ago now, is that we've evolved towards primarily focusing on new homes because we see it as the tip of the spear for driving costs down and scaling our business quickly. But everything that I described is available also for retrofits.

Tom Raftery: 20:57

And does leasing fundamentally change adoption curves are you finding?

Dan Yates: 21:03

So we just got started with it and where we launched it and put the most focus initially is in Maryland and our pipeline now is almost a hundred percent lease jobs in Maryland. It's a slam dunk there. It's very exciting. And it is driving adoption meaningfully. You know, the other thing I'd add that has been really exciting news for us in the last just quarter is we have a very large project in Colorado with Lennar 1500 homes. We're in almost half of their communities across the front range. And they started completing homes in Q4 and selling them over the last three to four months and the energy and enthusiasm in their sales organisation for selling Geo is just off the charts. And it's so exciting for us because we knew geothermal was a great product. We believed that it would make a difference. But they're selling a home and the home has a lot of capabilities and characteristics and people want to talk about the layout of the bedrooms and how many cars can fit in the garage and the siding, the knobs on the stove, there's a thousand things Right. Would geo make a difference? And we're seeing that It is. Lennar actually just shared with us, and I can't share the numbers, but they have statistical data now that shows that their conversion rate on geo homes is higher than on non-geo homes. And anecdotally, their salespeople are raving about it. And my favorite part is that most of the sales reps are starting their tours in the basement because they wanna show the customer the geothermal system. And the quotes I'm getting are things like, we never used to talk about the HVAC, like zero. And now it's a, now it's a selling point in, in every meeting with a customer. The idea that for builders the incentive landscape is such that they sometimes get paid to switch. And it's a real differentiator, especially in this market where production home building has had to contract recently and there's like a lot of excess inventory. It's a big deal for them.

Tom Raftery: 23:15

And I saw that A DOE analysis, the Department of Energy analysis suggests that widespread geothermal could avoid 24,500 miles of new transmission. So with that in mind, is geothermal actually a grid infrastructure strategy, disguised as HVAC?

Dan Yates: 23:37

I think that's how I like to think about it. Yeah, you That's exactly right. It's essentially a form of distributed infrastructure. So the utilities and the regulators have a choice. They're either going to invest in these tens of thousands of, miles of line or they can just incentivise geothermal, and each one of these wells effectively acts as a replacement for additional transmission and distribution infrastructure. And they last a hundred years, and there's no imminent domain problems, there's no easements that you need to get. It's a lower, lower maintenance and lower complexity solution to this problem.

Tom Raftery: 24:22

And if the incentives change or ITCs shrink, do the economics still hold?

Dan Yates: 24:28

That's the, path that we're on, I would analogise to solar or to electric vehicles. In the first 10, 15 years of their rapid mainstreaming, they needed these incentives. And now you're seeing on both EVs which are a tremendously complicated technology, and solar, which is frankly less complicated, that the costs have come down so far that they can stand on their own without, incentives. And we're, ambitiously, charting that, same path. That said, for the reasons we just discussed, which is that geothermal is explicitly serves as a form of grid infrastructure, our thesis is that the steady state will not be no incentives, but there will be a continued level of incentivising of this system on an ongoing basis because it serves this broader purpose.

Tom Raftery: 25:26

And if they are leased devices, does that mean they are connected there's a cloud-based app somewhere that the owner can use to control from their phone and that Dandelion, the company has access to the data as well?

Dan Yates: 25:46

Yeah, that's a great question. And it's a good, it's a wise connection you made. So, all of our systems come with the option to have monitoring and cloud-based connectivity. As a general matter, because it costs around 500 bucks, our builders often don't include it in their base package. A homeowner can always choose to add it. And then, but then you're right on our lease systems, we include that by default.

Tom Raftery: 26:11

Okay. And so in that scenario, if you have access to a hundred, a thousand, a million geothermal homes. You become a virtual power plant for a utility company, potentially.

Dan Yates: 26:29

Yeah, there's a possibility there. I would say the biggest benefit that geothermal brings does not require dispatching,

Tom Raftery: 26:39

Mm-hmm.

Dan Yates: 26:39

because the benefit is by design, the system doesn't ever trigger this aux or auxiliary heat system. And that happens automatically. So there is a secondary, dispatchable load dimension to this, but we've already cut the peak 75% out out the gate. We're not as focused on the virtual power plant strategy for that reason. It's like we're base load in a sense. Peak reduction that's coming automatically.

Tom Raftery: 27:14

And have you spotted any surprises in the data you're getting from the geothermal homes?

Dan Yates: 27:22

It's worth putting in context, you know, Dandelion has been around for almost 10 years and we've installed a nearly 5,000 heat pumps and, we've been monitoring many of them for, for many years. So we actually have quite a robust set of data. And initially the business started selling direct to consumer. So, we would offer monitoring to those customers and many of them took us up on it. So we have interesting longitudinal data across many homes in many years. I'd say the most interesting and, useful thing from us looking at the data is really mostly corroborating our designs and our methodologies. What we have uniquely, I think is we have really clear visibility into the, dispersion of results. You design a system and then it's a construction project. There's always details that go a little bit left or right. So what you end up with at the end. And then that dispersion of results allow us to tighten our error bars and have allowed us to trim fat out of the system. Conventionally designed systems have layer upon layer of buffer. I can make this very concrete. When you put in a geothermal system, you want to drill as little as you can because drilling costs a lot of money. And the simple test of, did I not put in enough loop, is in the middle of the winter during a cold snap. If you don't have enough ground loop in, you're gonna suck all the heat outta the earth, the water coming back into the heat pump is gonna be too cold. And the threshold for these systems is the water needs to stay above 30 degrees. Again, you start to fall below that, you're gonna have a degradation in performance. You won't be able to heat the house. You know, you won't hit your capacity. What I'm saying is close enough for the to be accurate. So, if you have a system that is finely designed on the coldest days, it should get close to 30 degrees. I have put a system in my house with the conventional non Dandelion approach.'cause I live in DC and Dandelion isn't doing retrofits in DC. And on the coldest day of the year, this year, DC had the coldest, longest cold snap in 150 years this year. So this is not just your average cold snap. My system was still operating at 43 degrees Fahrenheit, which is.

Tom Raftery: 29:50

Over specced.

Dan Yates: 29:51

Indicative that this, I have probably double the ground loop that I need. And I paid, I had to pay for it. And I out the nose because it's not a tuned system, and that's just business as usual in geothermal industry. So that's a huge part of what Dandelion has done with this. Critically we've done it safely because we have this closed loop of data coming back that tells us that our system designs are working.

Tom Raftery: 30:18

And if we fast forward 10 years, what percentage of new homes at that point will be geothermal do you think?

Dan Yates: 30:27

We have two goals in mind, for Dandelion we always talk about, and you'll see this in our, announcements, the, the day we get to 10,000 homes is day one for us. It's like, okay, now we're, now we actually matter. We're a real business at a scale that is worth talking about. And we're on a fast path to that. And we, think we're gonna be there pretty soon. That's still only 1% of US homes. US new homes a year. Where we think we ought to be is we think that geothermal systems should be easily 30% of US new, home construction. and there's no real reason why it isn't essentially anywhere where you have a meaningful heating and cooling bill, geothermal is the better answer.

Tom Raftery: 31:08

How replicable is this model outside of the US?

Dan Yates: 31:14

Well, actually the place that has the most concentration of geothermal in the world is not the US. It's Scandinavia. So,

Tom Raftery: 31:23

Hmm.

Dan Yates: 31:23

Very replicable there. They're the leader. It's expanding into Germany and Poland. And all through Northern Europe. It's getting increasingly popular in the UK. And then, I don't know, I know there's some geothermal going on in Korea, but I'm not as familiar with what's happening in Asia.

Tom Raftery: 31:42

Okay. Okay, quick lightning round of questions. Are you up for that?

Dan Yates: 31:48

Yeah.

Tom Raftery: 31:49

Great. Super. Couple of quick questions and one sentence answers. So, if you were building a new home today in a cold climate, air source heat pump, or geothermal,

Dan Yates: 32:02

A hundred percent geothermal?

Tom Raftery: 32:04

That was an easy one. Okay. For decarbonising heating at scale, speed of deployment, or grid resilience first?

Dan Yates: 32:12

I think they're actually both the same thing because what we're running into is the grid is becoming the limiting factor on speed of deployment.

Tom Raftery: 32:21

Okay, cool. If policymakers have 10 billion to spend, should they build new transmission lines or reduce peak demand in homes?

Dan Yates: 32:30

Definitely the latter. Reducing peak demand.

Tom Raftery: 32:34

And electrify everything as fast as possible or electrify in ways that minimise peak load?

Dan Yates: 32:40

I think again, it's actually the same thing. The thing that's going to hold back electrifying is going to be peak load.

Tom Raftery: 32:46

Upfront subsidies for homeowners or long-term grid investment.

Dan Yates: 32:50

I think the right calculus here is what is the cost per kilowatt and kilowatt hour of the investment and how much friction is there in achieving that investment? And what we see is, the cost per kilowatt and kilowatt hour of, incentivising geothermal is very low. And all of the broader political issues around larger scale investment, like imminent domain and easements all evaporate when you do geothermal. Sorry, that was two sentences.

Tom Raftery: 33:24

Nevermind. We'll let you off a left field. Question for you. If you could have any person or character, alive or dead real or fictional as a champion for geothermal home heating, who would it be and why?

Dan Yates: 33:42

That's a funny one. I don't have any idea who do I want to be the flag bearer of geothermal. To me, the, the ideal flag bearer is an every man. That's the point here is that geothermal is being mainstreamed and it doesn't require Tony Stark. And it doesn't require the pocketbook of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. It's like, it's Homer Simpson. It's your every man who just wants to have a lower bill and a more reliable system and have a home with better resale value.

Tom Raftery: 34:17

Fantastic. Fantastic. Dan, we're coming towards the end of the podcast now. Is there any question that I didn't ask that you wish I did or aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to think about?

Dan Yates: 34:30

I think we've hit a lot of the key points. We're growing like crazy and we're hiring. And I'd love to point any one of your listeners who are interested in joining the cause here to check us out at dandelionenergy.com. And obviously if any, any home builders who are interested in bringing geothermal into one of their communities. We are now doing geothermal nationwide. We're especially focused in the Mountain West, the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, but we're doing projects all over the country and are always eager to meet new builders who are interested in learning about geothermal.

Tom Raftery: 35:03

Okay, Dan, that's been really interesting. If people would like to know more about your self or any of the things we discussed on the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Dan Yates: 35:13

Yeah, please also visit us at dandelionenergy.com and you can learn all about what we're up to how we do it, and you know, you can always reach out directly to us through the contact form and the emails.

Tom Raftery: 35:26

Great. Dan, that's been fascinating. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Dan Yates: 35:30

Thank you so much for having me.

Tom Raftery: 35:31

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.