The First Geothermal City: America's Original Hot Water District
Near Boise, Idaho
Boise holds a distinction most American cities don't know to claim: it built the first geothermal district heating system in the United States, and that system has been running, in one form or another, since eighteen ninety-two.
The story starts with a well drilled east of downtown in the late eighteen eighties. The driller hit hot water, not hot spring water exactly, but water heated by the geothermal gradient of the Snake River Plain, where the earth's crust is thinner than usual and heat moves toward the surface. The water came up at temperatures high enough for space heating, which someone quickly realized meant you could skip burning firewood entirely.
By eighteen ninety-two, hot water was flowing through pipes to Christopher Moore's house on Warm Springs Avenue, the first geothermally heated residence in America. Within a few years, the Artesian Hot and Cold Water Company had connected hundreds of homes and businesses along the avenue. The Natatorium resort pool ran on the same water.
The system contracted in mid-century when cheap hydropower and natural gas arrived. But it never disappeared. In the nineteen eighties, the city drilled new wells downtown and expanded the system to government buildings and commercial properties. Today four separate geothermal heating systems serve Boise, collectively heating around three hundred fifty buildings including city hall and the state capitol.
There are only a handful of cities in the world with district-scale geothermal heating, mostly in Iceland. Boise did it first, in the American West, in the eighteen nineties, with technology that was barely understood at the time. The earth under this city has been doing useful work for a very long time.
