Used to live just a couple blocks from Copley Square. And knew Stella Trafford fairly well, delighted to hear she's still around.

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/001/science/One_power_station_under_God+.shtml

One power station under God

Hundreds of feet beneath Copley Plaza's Trinity Church, construction crews are drilling Boston's first geothermal energy tap

By Michael Paulson, Globe Staff, 1/1/2002 Throughout history, Christians have looked into the bowels of the Earth and seen hell.

Milton described ''a dungeon horrible.'' Dante envisioned an inferno of pain and suffering. Bosch painted an elaborate subterranean torture chamber.

But, when the preachers at Trinity Church in Boston cast their eyes netherward, they see energy.

Hoping to harness heat traditionally associated with Satan to cool a house of God, Trinity's leaders have decided to attempt a project unlike any other in downtown Boston - using the warmth deep below the Earth's surface to regulate their indoor climate.

Starting tomorrow, 13 construction workers will begin the six-week process of drilling six 1,500-foot-deep holes into the earth, three along St. James Avenue and three along Copley Square.

The holes, just 8 inches in diameter but twice as deep as the neighboring John Hancock Tower, will be used to bring energy from the underworld to the undercroft, as the church basement is called, using the Earth's constant temperature as a reservoir from which to draw warmth in the winter and into which to dump heat in the summer.

That is geothermal heat exchange, an environmentally friendly form of heating and cooling that has become increasingly popular around the country, but is still rare in New England. Geothermal energy, whose roots go back to the days when some Romans used hot springs to heat their homes, still generates less than 1 percent of the nation's cooling capacity, but is growing as the costs come down, the reliability rises, and consumers become more interested in environmental protection, according to Ryan Katofsky, an energy specialist at Arthur D. Little.

The theory is this: At 1,500 feet below the surface, the Earth is a constant 50 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Though not exactly balmy, that's warm enough to be useful. Geothermal heat pumps, like the ones to be used at Trinity, use a standing column of water to extract heat from the Earth when it's cold, and dump excess heat from the indoor air when it's hot.

Geothermal energy is most common in the West, where reservoirs of steam can be used to generate electricity. But, in New England, there are no reservoirs of very hot water, so the main potential use of geothermal energy is by using the low-temperature Earth energy for exchange through these heat pumps.

A handful of local enterprises already use geothermal exchange successfully, such as the Hastings Elementary School in Westborough, which was built in 1970 with a ground-source heat-pump system for heating and cooling. And the Massachusetts Audubon Society on Jan. 11 plans to break ground on a new nature center on the grounds of the old Boston State Hospital in Mattapan that will be heated and cooled by geothermal energy as part of the society's effort to demonstrate environmentally-friendly technologies.

Unlike most users of geothermal exchange, who choose the technology for environmental or economic reasons, Trinity's first reason for considering geothermal exchange is aesthetic: The church needs to make changes to a building so iconic that all changes must be invisible.

Over the last decade, the 268-year-old congregation has blossomed into one of the state's most vibrant, with 3,800 member households and another 200,000 visitors each year, according to church spokesman David Trueblood. The church has essentially no room to accommodate social functions, classes and meetings; most of its staff works out of rented offices on Boylston Street.

But the congregation's ability to physically accommodate its growth is hamstrung by its spectacular home - a 125-year-old Romanesque Revival masterpiece created by architect H. H. Richardson. Trinity Church is one of the most important works of architecture in the country, and for the last 30 years it has been designated a National Historic Landmark.

Further complicating any efforts to change Trinity is that the building, like the rest of the Back Bay, was constructed on filled-in mud flats. Trinity officials are painfully aware of the instability of the area - the earth under the church actually began to move, causing its foundation and parts of the building to crack, when the 60-story glass Hancock Tower was being constructed in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

So, bedeviled by a complex array of architectural, environmental and financial challenges, church officials decided they had but one choice as they look for more space as part of a $53 million restoration and expansion project: Finish their basement, much of which still has a dirt floor, and which is hemmed in by the estimated 4,000 wood pilings without which the church would collapse.

The basement has no heat and no air conditioning - a major problem if as many as 800 people are going to be expected to sit still for courses on introductory Episcopalianism and lectures on interfaith relations.

But the conventional means of heating and cooling office space are essentially unthinkable at Trinity.

A cooling tower on the roof? Not only is such a solution visually unimaginable, but the roof of the church is so steeply pitched that it's also physically impossible.

A cooling plant in the attic? Architects said to get a mechanical unit the size of a tractor-trailer inside the church would require dismantling the facade and then installing a cooling unit whose vibrations and water would pose a constant threat to the priceless building.

''We investigated the conventional options to understand the costs, but then we considered the impact on the building and the neighborhood,'' said architect Stefan Knust of Goody, Clancy & Associates. ''The conventional system would blow steam for three seasons a year, and can you imagine steam coming out of the top of that church?''

So the designers turned to geothermal exchange, which generally costs more to construct but less to operate than traditional heating and cooling systems. Geothermal energy is environmentally friendly in that it is more efficient and therefore requires less fossil-fuel generated electricity than other types of heating and cooling systems, and that fits into efforts by the Episcopal Church USA and the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts to make the denomination more environmentally responsible.

The federal government has been pushing geothermal energy, not only for environmental reasons but also as a way of diversifying the nation's energy supply and reducing its dependence on foreign oil. Geothermal energy now represents less than 1 percent of the nation's energy use, but officials at the US Department of Energy hope that geothermal energy will supply heat or electricity to 7 million homes and businesses by 2010.

When it is completed, the Trinity project will be invisible, but it will have a dramatic temporary impact on Copley Square.

The church's contractors plan to erect a 10-foot-high fence along the Copley Square and St. James Avenue sides of the church, and plan to remove two linden trees from the corner of Clarendon and St. James.

Construction workers will use truck-mounted hydraulic-piston drills to dig the holes, using an escalating string of rods to push an auger through layers of dirt and rock.

Once the holes are drilled, the workers will remove the rods - which will weigh 12 tons each at full length - and insert what amounts to a very long, 4-inch wide, plastic straw, according to Patrick Watson-Hogan, project executive with Shawmut Design and Construction.

Then the energy exchange can begin.

Each hole is filled with 2,250 gallons of water - drawn from either the bedrock or a faucet, but not from water near the surface that could affect the water table under the Back Bay. The water will circulate down the pipe and up the straw, always returning at the temperature of the bedrock - 50 to 55 degrees.

The water from below ground will be used to remove heat from the building during the summer, and add heat during the winter.

At the top of each column of water will be a small pump that will push the water to an underground mechanical vault the church plans to construct. Inside that vault, 13 heat pumps will transfer the energy from the underground water to a second pool of water that will then circulate in pipes in the church basement and parish house.

Neighbors are viewing the project warily.

''It's a technology I was not familiar with - why would I be? - but it sounds effective and fairly quick,'' said Stella Trafford, vice president of Friends of Copley Square. ''The engineers are very enthusiastic about it, and very convincing, and if we have a little inconvenience from them, we just have to say we are cooperating with God in improving the church.''

-- Anonymous, January 01, 2002