The Oak Park Residence Corp. (OPRC) recently was awarded a $250,000 grant from the Illinois Climate Bank and the Illinois Finance Authority to look into how the village might create a neighborhood geothermal loop system.
Geothermal systems use a system of underground pipes to leverage the earth’s constant subsurface temperature to heat and cool homes, thereby providing a sustainable method for heating and cooling homes without the use of fossil fuels.
Neighborhood geothermal operates on a loop to provide a shared, utility-scaled underground piping network to provide heating and cooling to an entire neighborhood.
The geothermal loop being considered would serve the segment of Oak Park bordered by Washington, Austin, Madison and Harvey.
Residents of the possible geothermal neighborhood loop in Oak Park-Washington to Madison and Austin to Harvey can learn more on Thursday, July 16 in a meeting at the Infant Welfare Society, 28 Madison St. in Oak Park. The program will start at 6 p.m.
Lindsey Roland Nieratka, chief sustainability officer with the village, said that one of the reasons this area was chosen was a possible geothermal loop is that it has a mix of commercial, residential, municipal and not-for-profit buildings that could all potentially tap into the loop.
David Pope, executive director of OPRC, said that the process began several years ago when the federal government put out a request for grant responses. At that time, OPRC reached out to several potential allies including the village, Architectural Consulting Engineers of Oak Park, Terra Engineering and Oak Park Apartments.
“We started thinking, this could be exciting to be able to do this on a larger scale,” he said.
Their first efforts did not win a grant, so they tried again in 2025 when the state of Illinois offered a similar grant. This time, Oak Park won a grant, along with another project in Chicago and another downstate.
Pope called the grants a way to look at different types of communities in which a neighborhood geothermal loop could be created.
“This is a planning grant,” he said, adding that it will enable them to look at different options to see what could work in Oak Park.
Questions to be answered include what level of participation is needed, what are the economics involved and how would it be administered. The goal is to create a business and administrative model to make the neighborhood geothermal loop sustainable in the long term.
Mark Nussbaum of Architectural Consulting Engineers is working with Jamil Bousaab of the civil engineering firm Terra Engineering on the technical side of the grant.
Their firms would eventually be designing the horizontal part of the geothermal loop that will go around the neighborhood and the loop field, which is the part of the equipment that will run vertically, underground.
At this stage in the process, Nussbaum says they are working with ways to ensure that every home, apartment building or business within the boundaries could tie into the loop. Another firm would help with the installation of the equipment that would go inside buildings to provide heating and cooling.
“I’ve done a lot of geothermal over the last 25 years,” Nussbaum said. “One problem is finding a drill rig that can work on our small lots. A real appeal to this approach is that it would bring geothermal to a population that couldn’t consider it even if they wanted to.”
For now with the grant, Nussbaum and Bousaab will be considering different approaches. A hurdle in installing geothermal in Oak Park is that the vertical loops need to be deeply dug, which can be challenging with trees and utilities on small lots. Nussbaum says they are looking at alternatives such as a newer approach that eliminates the need for so many vertical loops and might cut down the need to only three or four vertical holes that would have a far greater capacity.
The village’s Roland Nieratka said that economies of scale are a big part of the neighborhood geothermal project. Installation for geothermal systems is expensive when compared to carbon-fueled systems, and that sharing the infrastructure will make it more affordable.
Another part of the grant process will be figuring out the administrative and financial piece of the puzzle. The end result might involve leasebacks and will need to take into account a changing landscape in tax breaks for sustainability work. Currently, tax breaks for geothermal work exist for commercial projects but not residential.
Nussbaum said: “Other communities have done this on the east coast. It’s pretty straight forward from an engineering standpoint, but every project is very site specific. The tricky part is, who runs it? Is it a municipal utility?”
Roland Nieratka added that working towards Oak Park’s first community geothermal loop is a good fit for the village’s goals to move away from carbon-based fuels and reduce emissions and said that if this project bears fruit, it could be a model for expansion in the village.