Sustainability in Your Ear Transcript: Dandelion Energy CEO Dan Yates On Geothermal Heating and Cooling

Mitch Ratcliffe 0:10
Hello, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I'm your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation.

Today, we're going to be talking about geothermal heating and cooling, which works by tapping into the constant temperature underground—that's around 55 degrees Fahrenheit year round—and using a loop of buried pipes and a heat pump, this technology can pull warmth into our home in the winter and push heat back into the ground in the summer. It's the most efficient HVAC technology available, four times more efficient than a furnace and twice as efficient as an air source heat pump. Yet it remains stuck at roughly 1% of U.S. installations because of one persistent barrier: upfront cost.

A residential geothermal system can run between $20,000 and $31,000 before incentives, and while homeowners can recoup the expense through lower energy bills over time, most people can't afford to write that first check. Builders face margin pressure on every home and default to the cheapest option that will meet their codes.

Our guest today is Dan Yates, the CEO of Dandelion Energy, whose co-founder, Kathy Hannun, spoke with me in 2024. He joins me today to discuss how the company just eliminated the upfront cost of geothermal systems. Now, amazingly, this green option is a product of the current Congress—I know, hard to believe.

This summer, Congress passed HR 1, the law known as the Big, Beautiful Bill. It ended a residential clean energy tax credit that homeowners could use for geothermal installations. But the same legislation preserved the 30 to 50% commercial investment tax credit through 2034 and for the first time, authorized third-party leasing of residential geothermal systems. What looked like a setback for clean heating became an opening for a new business model in the industry.

The stakes for geothermal are significant. According to the Department of Energy, widespread adoption of geothermal heat pumps could eliminate the need for 24,500 miles of new transmission lines, roughly the equivalent of laying high voltage cables across the United States eight times. As data centers and electrification drive unprecedented demand on the grid, geothermal offers something solar and wind cannot: consistent heating and cooling that actually reduces peak electricity load by 60% on the coldest days.

Since 2017, Dandelion has installed thousands of residential systems and drilled over 1 million linear feet of ground loops to tap the Earth's energy. And in April, Dandelion announced a partnership with Lennar, one of the nation's largest home builders, to deploy geothermal in more than 1,500 Colorado homes over the next two years. It's among the biggest residential geothermal projects in U.S. history.

In October, Dandelion launched its first residential geothermal leasing program in the United States that allows homeowners to install geothermal for less than traditional HVAC systems. Buyers pay as little as $10 to $40 a month in ongoing fees—that's typically a fraction of their energy savings—to get these new systems.

Now, Dan has translated policy shifts into market opportunities in the past. Before Dandelion, he co-founded Opower, an energy efficiency software company that helped utilities engage consumers on energy savings, and he led Opower through a billion-dollar-plus IPO and its 2016 sale to Oracle.

We're going to talk today with Dan about how the leasing model changes the calculus, both for builders and buyers, what the policy landscape looks like heading into 2026, and why geothermal has remained an emerging technology for over a century while solar went mainstream. We'll also discuss what it would take for ground source heat pumps to follow solar's adoption curve over the next couple of decades.

You can learn more about Dandelion Energy at dandelionenergy.com—that's all one word, no space, no dash. Dandelionenergy.com. Can leasing do for geothermal what it did for rooftop solar? Let's find out right after this brief commercial break.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome to the show, Dan. How you doing today?

Dan Yates 4:35
I'm great. Thanks for having me, Mitch.

Mitch Ratcliffe 4:42
Well, thanks for joining me. It was really interesting to talk with Kathy a couple of years ago about what Dandelion is doing, and your leasing programs are a first for residential geothermal. Before we get into that, why is geothermal a better option for many homeowners?

Dan Yates 4:51
Yeah, it's been really great being at the helm of Dandelion and watching the positive reception that we're getting in the market as we are now really focused on partnering with the nation's largest new home builders to bring geothermal to life in their homes.

And the new construction market is very different than it was 10 years ago. If you'd asked a builder in 2012, "Hey, what do you think about a new fancy, all-electric, high-efficiency system?" their response would be, "This is a solution to a problem I don't have."

And what's changed now is that both consumer demand for high-efficiency, energy-efficient and energy-conscious solutions, and even more importantly, state incentives and requirements have tilted the playing field so that putting in gas is not as cheap as it used to be, and putting in an all-electric solution is much more inexpensive and more appealing to their home buyers.

And so what we're seeing is, as our builder partners are putting geothermal into their homes, they get all of the brand benefits of, "Wow, this is the best way to heat and cool a home, and I'm getting that in a new house." And that's a—you know, the market right now for new homes is tough. The volume is flat. A lot of builders are discounting their homes to get them to sell, and having something like geothermal in a house really stands out.

And we're seeing it every day with our launch partners. Their sales reps are telling us—and this is my favorite anecdote—they're starting the tours of their homes in the basement, which they've never done before, because they start with the geo. And customers really are fascinated and excited about it.

Mitch Ratcliffe 6:38
It is a really interesting story. And obviously, if you buy the house where you can say, "Check out my basement and the geothermal system," you're the coolest kid on the block. So walk us through how the change in the law changes the economics for the homebuilder decision. What does the math look like now?

Dan Yates 6:55
Yeah, so two things have happened. First, states have put in place lots of incentives to buy down the cost of geothermal systems upfront. So in our top markets—in the Mountain West, in the Mid-Atlantic and in the Northeast—a typical home that we put in geo in, our all-in costs to that home builder are going to be between $20,000 and $30,000, which is a lot more than what they pay for conventional HVAC and heating.

But what happens is the incentives at the state level will bring that cost down, typically, by more than $20,000, and so then they're in the single digits. And that is what's made it possible for us to sell as many geothermal systems as we've had in the last few years. That's the first thing.

The second thing is that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was passed this summer, unlocked geothermal leasing. And there were two—the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in general got rid of clean energy stuff, right? So it's funny for me to be celebrating it for our business.

But geothermal had two tax credits, one was for residential customers and one was for commercial customers. They did get rid of the residential tax credit, but they kept the commercial one, and they wrote into the law that you could lease geothermal systems, which traditionally was not possible for tax code reasons.

And so what that has allowed us to do is we can go with our home builders, and they can offer the system with a lease, and that system is then 40% less expensive, because the tax credit is a 40% tax credit in most cases. And so I said, you know, before that 40%, we were at, like, call it, you know, $10,000. Now it brings it down another chunk. And we have some projects where it's net negative cost for our builders to put in these systems.

Mitch Ratcliffe 8:48
So how long does the lease last for the homeowner, and what happens at the end of the lease?

Dan Yates 8:53
Yeah, so the lease—most typical leases that we're seeing are 20-year leases. And one thing I really want to clarify is when people think about leases in a home, the first thing their minds often go to are solar leases. And a typical solar lease will be on an asset that's $15,000 to $20,000, and so customers are paying $150 bucks a month, $250 bucks a month. And the solar industry has done a really good job of, like, selling that so it doesn't feel like you're paying anything, because you're just paying a different electric bill. But you're paying $150, $200 bucks a month.

These leases we're talking about are like $20 bucks a month, $40 bucks a month. And because the underlying lease, when you take all of those tax credits and incentives, is not a $20,000 lease, it's like a $6,000 lease. So the home buyer is not signing up for a big—it's not a big deal. What's left is just not that large.

And so then that, let's say, $30, $40 bucks a month payment that they're making is far less than the energy that they're saving by putting in the geo system.

Mitch Ratcliffe 9:59
We're going to talk more about geographic coverage later, in terms of where you're offering the leases. But is this a technology that can be installed anywhere, or is a geologically active area more advantageous?

Dan Yates 10:11
Yeah, glad you asked that question. So absolutely, it can be put in anywhere. And in fact, we wouldn't know—the only place it can't be put in is a geologically active area. Like, we can't go in on a volcano, and most of our customers don't live on volcanoes. So it's good.

What I jokingly call our geothermal—lukewarm geothermal—because that's what we're looking for. We're looking for 60-degree earth, which is basically everywhere in the U.S. And that is way warmer than the outside air in the winter and way cooler than the outside air in the summer, and that's how we're able to get so much more efficient heat exchange.

Mitch Ratcliffe 10:47
Back to the Big, Beautiful Bill for just a second. Was this an intentional win? I mean, was the industry advocating for this, or was there just a particular legislator who slipped this in somehow? How'd it happen?

Dan Yates 10:59
Yeah, so nothing is ever fully clear in the fog of war, but I would say for sure, the industry was not enthusiastic about getting rid of the residential tax credit. So that was definitely something that we all saw as a loss, to bid farewell to it.

And then the industry did, among several other ideas, bring this leasing idea to the table, and then it took some, you know, willing legislators to put it into the bill.

Mitch Ratcliffe 11:29
The other thing that the Big, Beautiful Bill did was it eliminated what was described as the "limited use property" problem. You know, under the old tax code, a leasing company couldn't repossess a system if somebody didn't pay their bill. Does that change the willingness of capital to back the construction of new homes? Talk us through the math of that.

Dan Yates 11:51
Yeah. So I think the simple way to think about that is what I was pointing to a little bit earlier, but not explicitly—that the tax code is pretty clear that to be allowed to lease something, one of the easy-to-understand concepts is, well, if I'm leasing it and you don't pay, I should—I have to be able to repossess it and lease it to somebody else.

And the biggest cost in a geothermal system is this bore that we, you know, drill in your backyard and bury a ground loop. It's basically a hole in the ground. And historically, the tax interpretation said it's very hard to repossess a hole in the ground. So this doesn't close, but you can't lease it.

The simple thing also to understand is the law now just says you can lease geothermal systems. And that's essentially all you have to understand—now that, so whatever tax code concerns have just been superseded by the Congressional stipulation that 100% unlocks the leasing money.

Mitch Ratcliffe 12:45
Are you seeing an influx of capital as a result?

Dan Yates 12:50
Absolutely. So we launched our leasing product with a partner, Upstream Leasing, who is enthusiastic to be deploying capital against this new opportunity. And we are in talks currently with several other new partnerships and financial organizations that are looking to get into geothermal leasing.

Mitch Ratcliffe 13:10
Some homeowners, when they hear the word "lease," may balk at the idea of having part of their home owned by somebody else. Now, you mentioned this is a 20-year lease—at the end of that, the homeowner owns it. But are you also thinking about the potential to add services, maintenance services, and other things into that regular payment so that they also get some sort of additional value from the lease experience?

Dan Yates 13:34
Yeah. So our focus right now is on bringing the lowest possible way to bring geothermal to homeowners, and that is, in many cases, with the lease. And then we're focused on keeping that monthly payment as low as possible. And so that pushes in the direction of not layering on service packages. But customers are always able to access those in whatever region that we're in.

Mitch Ratcliffe 13:57
The retrofit customers, particularly in New York and Connecticut—in those two community areas, states—they're paying between $200 and $300 a month for the lease. Why is a retrofit more expensive than a new build?

Dan Yates 14:09
Yeah, so that's, in fact, why we've put so much of our business attention on new builds. Now, there's tremendous economies of scale when you're doing geothermal 100 homes at a time.

So the easiest part of it to understand is the mobilization costs. When we drill a single borehole, it takes us—it takes us less than a day to drill a borehole, but it takes us three to four days to do it in a residential setting, because we have to get all this stuff loaded up, drive to the house. You get there and one in three times, grandma's Tercel is in the driveway, and so you can't get the rig in the right spots until she comes back and moves it. And, you know, other issues.

And then when you drill that one bore, then you got to pack everything up and go to the next job. And in a commercial setting, our rig shows up, we plunk a hole down. As soon as we're done, we move over 50 feet, we start on the next hole.

And so if you do a mobilization of even 20 homes at a time, even if your mobilization time is exactly the same, dividing it by 20, that's a 95% reduction in mobilization costs. Then there are many other factors that are similar in the scale—that we get allows us to get preferential pricing from our supply chain partners. And all of these things accrue to a reality where our new home construction costs are half what it costs in a residential retrofit environment.

Mitch Ratcliffe 15:36
Now, another thing about New York in particular is that they have just doubled their tax credit for geothermal. And yes, obviously that makes it a very lucrative market. But you're going into 15 other states. How do you choose where you're going and where are you now?

Dan Yates 15:51
Yeah, so what's exciting about the lease is it's really unlocking so many more states, because all of a sudden you have a 40% discount everywhere you look, and you have a purpose-built vehicle to share some of the ongoing benefits—basically to transfer the cost upfront into ongoing costs that match the ongoing benefits, right? So you have a double, a double win there.

That said, where we start, where we've started, our focus is in states that have—and because it's such a big market, and we can choose to be choosy—is states that have the greatest geothermal incentives. And that is in the three major regions that we've identified: the Mountain West, the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast.

The only other variable that I would add is colder states yield even better ongoing economics, because geothermal saves a lot of money for cooling as well. And actually, interestingly, the Southeast is one of the original boom areas for geothermal.

But when we do the math, we see the best ongoing economics anywhere where it's meaningfully cold for any period of time—which doesn't have to be Maine and Toronto. It can be Raleigh, North Carolina. And so that's where we sort of use those two lenses.

Mitch Ratcliffe 17:11
We're talking about growing market adoption. When do you see geothermal hitting a tipping point where it becomes a mainstream choice, rather than an emerging technology?

Dan Yates 17:20
Well, so that's what we're—that's what we're all about. And I'd say that moment is now.

So our biggest partner is Lennar. And Lennar is, by many measures, the largest home builder in America, and they go head to head with D.R. Horton for that title every year. And they're, you know, by any count, no one argues they're in the top three. They build almost 100,000 homes a year, and they do not build luxury homes. They build homes for the average American. You can't build 100,000 homes and sell them if you're selling them only to high-end buyers. And they build in almost every corner of the country.

And the reason that they've gone in as big on geothermal as they have with us is because we've gotten—their, you know, their terminology—we've gotten to cost parity. Every time we update our portfolio with them, the projects are costing them equal or less than it would to do conventional equipment.

They're like a Costco of home building. You know, they don't—they pay less for more. And we've gotten there, and that's the beautiful thing, and that's why—that's why we're growing. It's why it feels like, "Oh my gosh, this is finally unlocking."

Mitch Ratcliffe 18:32
That's really encouraging to hear. I want to take a quick commercial break, and then we'll come back and talk more particularly about how the leasing and the Lennar relationship are evolving. Stay tuned, folks.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear, and let's get back to the discussion with Dan Yates. He's the CEO of geothermal heating and cooling provider, Dandelion Energy.

You know, Dan, when Kathy Hannun was on the show—she's the co-founder of the company—she mentioned learning a lot from solar's leasing playbook. What are the lessons from solar's third-party ownership evolution that you're applying, and what mistakes or challenges do you think you're going to be able to overcome having learned from their lessons?

Dan Yates 19:16
Yeah, it's a great question. So I'd say two things.

One is, solar has really pioneered a couple of things. First of all, there's a whole financing industry of capital that is willing to buy and own distributed energy assets. So the ability to create a lease product in geothermal overnight was, in many ways, thanks to standing on the shoulders of the solar lease financing industry. That's probably not the answer you were looking for, but it definitely helped, you know, launch our lease product as quickly as it did, at least.

The other thing I'd say on the positive side is the solar industry has really learned how to describe an ongoing energy benefit to consumers in a way that gets them excited and believes in the long-term benefit—owning something that is going to keep their electric bills down over time. And that's something that we are still building that muscle to better describe and sell our services, because the home buyer value at the end of the day is very similar, which is: you have a thing in your house that cuts your electric bill in half forever.

And as rates are going up—we're just talking about the state of Virginia is looking at a 30% rate increase, possibly this year, because of all the AI data centers going in—everybody who doesn't have geothermal is going to take the full hit on that, and those geothermal customers aren't. So the solar industry has helped us figure out how to tell that story.

And then on the other side of the coin, you know, we see some builders who have scars. You know, in particular, the bankruptcies recently have left them—

Mitch Ratcliffe 20:50
You mean of the solar companies?

Dan Yates 20:53
Just to be clear, exactly. The solar company bankruptcies have left them leery of these long-term relationships, and that's why what we've focused on is we're not doing big leases with any of our builder customers.

So the biggest lease terms that we are seeing, that we're putting in front of them, are like $4,000, $5,000 leases, compared to in solar, as I said earlier, $15,000, $20,000, $25,000 leases. And when you're in that low, mid-single-digit range for the lease value, it becomes not a big deal for a builder.

A home buyer wants to sell their home, the new home buyer, like, has to assume a $3,000 lease five years from now. If it's a real issue, the home seller just, you know, folds that $3,000 payoff. Yeah. If it was a $20,000 concession, wow, that really hurts, right? But a $3,000 concession on a $600,000 home—it's like, let's get on with it, guys. It's sort of like that's in closing costs. So that's some of the big lessons we've taken away.

Mitch Ratcliffe 21:58
Now, you mentioned educating the market. Do you feel like there's a need for greater visibility for geothermal generally in the conversation about home ownership and the new grid that we're developing?

Dan Yates 22:12
So I'd say yes and no.

Yes, because 100% of homeowners don't know what geo is, and we see this every day when we talk with our builders, because they have their sales people out selling. They're selling these new homes, and these new homes come with geothermal.

But the reason why I say no is because the thing that is so exciting—and I just was getting a report from this two days ago from my VP of marketing, who was out in Colorado with our partner, Lennar, doing—where we're doing 1,500 homes with them over two years—and we were meeting with some of their, what they call NHCs, New Home Consultants, that are their sales people at the communities.

And the consultants, the NHCs, were raving about geo. They said, like—like I said earlier—one of them said, "I start my tour in the basement." Another one said that they have, like, gave anecdotes of three or more customers for this one community, who came to look at the home specifically because they knew it had geothermal.

One of them said the best thing that ever happened to me on this job is we stopped selling solar and we started selling geo, because people love geo. They had zero reports of anyone being unhappy about there being geo in the home. That's—that's what it's all about.

Mitch Ratcliffe 23:24
Well, and there's no panels. I mean, all the things, the external accoutrements of the technology that's all over the house or in the backyard—it's a very different thing. All you have is a heat pump, basically. Is that correct?

Dan Yates 23:36
That's right. And one of the things that—you didn't mean to emphasize this, but this is actually one of the biggest selling points that we see with our home builders—is there is no outside component.

So especially as home builders are putting in higher-density townhomes, and they have condensers they got to stick on rooftop patios, or they put them in the back and they eat up half of the porch. Like, where do you put these noisy, hot condensers, just for air conditioning? And then now, as more of them are electrifying, also for heating.

You walk through a townhome complex with air conditioning or heat pumps, and all summer long, you hear, you know, the on and off of these condensers. And you—it's, we're used to it.

You walk through a geo community, which is even better than just a single geo home, but a whole row of geo homes, and you just hear the wind in the trees. You hear the birds chirping. And that is such a big luxury for these builders, and now to get that at no additional cost—it's a huge selling point for them.

Mitch Ratcliffe 24:34
You also mentioned that the load that we're seeing on the grid, because of particularly the rise of AI—but prices going up 30%—are not going to be welcomed for very long. Are utilities reaching out, asking about putting geothermal in in order to relieve the grid of the demand that's associated with HVAC, particularly during the summer, so that they can sell more reliable power to the AI infrastructure at a higher profit?

Dan Yates 25:00
Yeah, yes, 100%.

So the primary modality of a utility reaching out is—the utilities operate in this sort of, you know, in this regulated monopoly, it's like a tense partnership between the utility and the utility commission, right?

And the way this has been manifesting is that the utilities, in conjunction with the utility commission direction, have been offering bigger and bigger incentives to buy down the cost of geo because they want to see geothermal in their state.

And that is what underlies the durable, permanent, non-politically motivated reason to subsidize upfront cost of geothermal—is that a geothermal system uses 25% the peak demand of an air source heat pump system, and that is a gargantuan gap.

And basically what these states are looking at is either we pay money to get a distributed form of infrastructure in the form of geothermal, or we're going to have to put in billions into transmission and distribution lines for all these, you know, energy-hog air source heat pumps. And they simply can't—they can't run, they can't get the licenses and the clearance, you know, in the eminent domain, fast enough to put in these lines as the, you know, AI revolution is happening.

Mitch Ratcliffe 26:20
I've talked with many people about the idea of microgrids and the distributed grid and so forth, but this is interesting because you're not thinking about geothermal necessarily sending power back to the grid—but it's simply relieving the grid of the demand. So you don't have to run the peaker plant at 4 p.m. on a hot July day, which is the most polluting and the most expensive power we generate.

Dan Yates 26:40
Yeah, the way to think about it, that really highlights how cool it is. The Earth is a huge thermal battery.

The heat that we're taking is actually solar energy that has been absorbed by the earth throughout the season, and that we're sucking up that summer heat in the winter from the thermal battery of the earth, and then we're ejecting heat back into that thermal battery in the summer to be consumed next winter.

And so geothermal is essentially giving the grid access to this pervasive thermal battery to shift load seasonally.

Mitch Ratcliffe 27:19
Now, Dandelion's installed over a million linear feet of ground loop since you launched in 2017. What's the bottleneck for the next million, or 10 million or 100 million feet of ground loop?

Dan Yates 27:30
What do you need to do? So our midterm target is to get to 10,000 homes a year, which would be only 1% of new home construction in the U.S., and we're racing towards that.

And it's really—the constraints are all operational on our side. We are, you know, we're hiring like crazy, we're training people, we're building our capacity, and we're getting the word out, like on great podcasts like this.

Mitch Ratcliffe 27:58
And these are good blue-collar jobs. Is that correct? What kind of people—what are the requirements to work on a Dandelion installation?

Dan Yates 28:06
So our field teams focus on drilling and what we call headering, which is the kind of surface work that we do once the ground loop has been installed to bring it into the house. There's often some excavation. There's pipe fusing. Yeah, these are great blue-collar jobs. They're well paid.

Mitch Ratcliffe 28:26
Do you see any potential slack demand at any time in the future? It doesn't sound like this is the kind of thing that goes away once it's well established.

Dan Yates 28:34
No. I mean, I think, look, we have 120 million homes in the U.S. that need to be upgraded to electric heating over the next generation, and we're starting with the million a year that are built new. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Mitch Ratcliffe 28:48
So when do you suspect we will see the hockey stick growth that solar went through in the 2010s?

Dan Yates 28:56
I mean, I think that this is the beginning of it, because the thing that really unlocked solar was leasing, and leasing has just come alive now here, and we have a very similar dynamic.

And so, you know, what Dandelion is enthusiastic about is, you know, we welcome new entrants in the market. And we have a first-mover advantage, and we're going to capitalize on it as aggressively as we can.

Mitch Ratcliffe 29:18
So how do you continue to differentiate in terms of your R&D investment? Is it greater efficiency in the heat pump system? Is it different thermal material that you're passing through the ground loop to be more efficient in the exchange of heat? Where do you need to concentrate your efforts?

Dan Yates 29:35
Yeah. So we see, you know, our advantages on a couple fronts.

One, on the R&D side, our major focus is around the heat pump itself, partnering with our manufacturing partners, to get the upfront cost of that heat pump down, and then also to design the heat pump in a way that allows us to minimize the balance of costs—other auxiliary equipment that's needed inside the home, as well as the ground loop itself.

On the ground loop side, our major focus is on building a very highly trained drilling organization and procuring and designing our fleet, our drilling and logistics fleet, to be optimized for the home builder problem.

So what you see in geothermal drilling today is, you've got a lot of very small mom-and-pop operators who do the retrofit stuff. And you have some more scaled operators that have all specialized on commercial jobs. And commercial jobs are like, you know, doing a Fortune 500 company's headquarters where you show up and you may drill—you may drill 250 boreholes all within an acre. And so that biases towards very large equipment that doesn't have to move at all.

And we have this sort of tweener problem. Like I said, huge mobilization efficiencies compared to residential, but our rigs do have to move 50 to 70 feet per hole. So, you know, in a commercial setting, you might be on your 50th hole and still only be 150 feet from the first one, whereas our 50th hole will be a half mile from the first one.

So we need equipment that's in between, and that's where we've been optimizing. And so we've got a drilling—well, you know, we're building a drilling cost advantage, and we're also building a heat pump design and upfront cost advantage.

And then the last thing is just scale. Everything gets cheaper with scale. So, you know, that's my number one focus—is we just need to be in the lead. And we're very, very focused on upfront cost as the—to our home builders—as the number one value that we bring them that is different from other geo. We can do it for much less, and that is what makes all the difference.

Mitch Ratcliffe 31:50
So a really interesting story. How can people keep up with this, what Dandelion Energy is doing, and potentially find out about getting a system?

Dan Yates 31:58
Follow us online. Please go to our website, dandelionenergy.com, and read about us in the news.

And if you're a home builder, please reach out, because we're very eager to work with folks all across the country. We have, in addition to the regions I just mentioned—the Mid-Atlantic, the Mountain West and the Northeast—we're doing a project in Tennessee, starting in January. We're talking to builders in Texas. You know, we've got projects all over the country that are in flight in the Midwest as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe 32:26
Dan, thanks very much for the time today. It's been a fascinating conversation.

Dan Yates 32:29
I appreciate it, Mitch. Thanks so much. It was fun to be here.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe 32:37
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You've been listening to my conversation with Dan Yates, CEO of Dandelion Energy. They are a geothermal heating and cooling company that recently introduced a low-cost leasing program after an unexpected renewables-friendly change to the law that allows home builders to offer geothermal leases. You can learn more about Dandelion Energy and its services at dandelionenergy.com. Dandelion Energy is all one word, no space, no dash. Dandelionenergy.com.

So first off, count me as surprised that the hostility toward renewables that was codified in the Big, Beautiful Bill opened the door to leasing geothermal systems. Critics have rightly focused on cuts in clean energy funding and tax credits, but this new leasing channel looks like it will actually accelerate the availability of geothermal heating and cooling across the country.

And eliminating that upfront cost of drilling and installing a geothermal energy pump will likely have the same effect on adoption as solar leasing did. It's a choice that homeowners didn't have six months ago, and Dan's optimism about geothermal energy reaching its tipping point appears to be justified.

The initial opportunity in new home construction, though, may be limited to large developments at first, but production-built developments represent between 70% and 80% of the roughly 1 million new homes the Census Bureau reports are built each year. And of course, we have a housing shortage right now that could accelerate construction.

Scaling drilling and installation capacity will be the key to hockey stick growth. And as Dan said, there is plenty of room for competitors on a geographic basis. As more companies enter the market, they'll drive down equipment costs with their investments.

But I think the most important takeaway from this conversation, for me at least, is the insight into the opportunity to rethink our infrastructure, not only as a race to connect and electrify society, but also to build in a way that reduces the load on the electric grid.

The AI transition, which is expected to require up to 10% of annual electricity production, could be viable based simply on introducing microgrid generation capacity in combination with reducing peak load demand that utilities must support today. And geothermal heating and cooling, switching all homes to heat pumps, whether they're geothermal or not, and intelligent power management could unlock existing generation capacity for other uses, lowering costs for all.

Then the challenge is weaning the heaviest fossil fuel-based energy users from expensive oil and gas as the cost of renewable energy continues its rapid descent. But look, it will never be zero—"too cheap to meter"—which was a story we once told ourselves about nuclear energy. In fact, it was the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission who said in 1954 to Congress, "It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter."

Okay, renewables are very promising, but they're not going to get there. And that's also the profit opportunity that all of these companies are pursuing. Renewables do have a quality that previous centralized generation technologies lacked. Once the cost of a geothermal or solar installation is paid off, the energy and the maintenance costs are incredibly low compared to today's generation infrastructure. When you have small microgrids and people taking care of their own systems, rather than having to have an entire fleet of utility trucks rolling around taking care of our infrastructure, the costs are much lower.

And so recalibrating our infrastructure to waste less energy and make better use of naturally occurring energy is a completely viable path to radically reduced emissions, and I think we can take heart in that possibility. Now it's up to policymakers and businesses to make it happen.

So we'll continue to follow Dandelion Energy and its peers in renewable efficient energy closely. And I hope you do me a favor. Could you help spread the word about renewables and energy efficiency? Please take a look at the more than 500 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear that are in our archives and share just one—just one—with your friends.

Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform can help your neighbors find us. Because folks, you're the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. Tell your friends, family, co-workers, the people you meet on the street, that they can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.

Thank you for your support. I'm Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and of course, let's all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.

The water cycle is palpable when you live at the bottom of a canyon in the Southern Cascades. This shot from the same location as last week's video shows how Elk Creek expands after moderate rainfall—the river is about 30 feet wider than before, but still far below its annual highwater mark. At flood stage, my head would be about six feet below the surface of the water and the creek a raging, 90-foot-wide torrent of trees, mud, and life-giving waters in their wildest form.

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As the weather gets colder and wetter, though still with drought rainfall levels, I hanker for Fall beauty. Here are two shots from near home.