By Joy Li ’18

If you’ve been on campus at all this summer, you may be wondering about all of the drilling on Armstrong Quad. It’s the start of the geothermal heating and cooling system for the new library.

Construction crews are drilling 80 wells, each 400 feet deep and about five and a half inches wide, all across Armstrong Quad. When the installation is complete, each well will contain a loop of pipes where water will circulate. The 80 underground wells will be arranged in a grid, and will function as a heat exchanger for the reversible geothermal heat pump that provides both heating and cooling in the library. During warm weather, the system will send excess heat from the library through the pipes and into the grid, instead of rejecting the warm air outside. The water circulation of the geothermal system transfers and stores the heat underground. Then, during the winter, the process reverses and the heat stored underground will be pumped back up and used to heat the library.

According Ian Johnson, director of the Office of Sustainability, the geothermal heating system is more than 100 percent efficient because it uses free energy from the earth. The old natural gas combustion heating system is significantly less efficient. Additionally, carbon emissions, which contribute to climate change, are completely eliminated in the geothermal heating process. The system is one of many sustainable elements of the new library building; it’s being built as a “net-zero” facility, which means on a annual basis, the library will be carbon-free and will produce enough electricity to operate itself.

“This is very impressive because it’s never been done in a building of this scale,” Johnson says. “It has to function 24/7 with the Block Plan in a library that’s over 90,000 square feet.”

The new “net-zero” library will not only reinforce CC’s goal of being carbon-neutral by 2020, it will also be a model for future buildings on campus and can serve as a tool of study for students and scholars in related fields. “I’m very excited about this,” Johnson says of the project. “This is the coolest project I’ve worked on.”