 Why is Berkeley drilling a hole under campus? It's not for oil prospecting, it's actually to look for a way to avoid the need for oil. Berkeley scientists are digging deep to find more sustainable ways to produce and manage the huge amount of energy the campus needs. We're the size of a small city in the state of California. We have a population of over 50,000, millions of square feet. So the energy we use every year for our mission of research and teaching is about the same amount of energy of 50,000 homes in the state of California. For more than 40 years, Berkeley has relied on this fossil fuel-burning power plant for more than 90% of the campus energy needs, mostly heating and some cooling of campus buildings. The plant was built in the mid-1980s, it's old, and it's getting towards the end of its useful life. What we'd like to do is move away from those fossil fuels and decarbonize the energy that we use in our campus buildings. So our goal is to take the emissions from this plant to 80% below where they are today to zero eventually. To achieve zero emissions, scientists at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory thought, why not recycle the heat that's generated when we use our computers air-conditioners, refrigerators, those so-called heat pumps, save that otherwise wasted heat, and reuse it to heat our buildings. A refrigerator inside is cold, but outside it generates a lot of heat. And the question is that whether that heat will go out to the atmosphere or can we use that heat and then store it. Professor Kanichi Soga is one of the leaders of this experiment. If successful, it could provide heating and cooling for numerous buildings on campus, potentially starting with the new Gateway building, the future home for Berkeley's division of computing, data science, and society. Berkeley, we have a rock formation under a campus. The question is that, is our rock good enough to store the heat? And we need to find that out. To test the rocks underground, Soga and his colleagues are digging by far the deepest hole ever under campus, 400 feet. Then they'll drop a tube with heated fluid down the hole, along with an instrument called a distributed fiber optic sensor. It sends a pulse of light down a fiber line, and with their knowledge of the qualities of that light, the scientist will deduce the temperature, seismic noise, and other movements at many points along the way down. The light goes through, and every point, light reflects back. And because the speed of light is constant, we know that reflected light where it came back from. And by doing that, we can analyze what is the temperature at different locations along the fiber for many, many kilometers or many, many miles. Soga's team will study the temperature changes that occur while the hot fluid circulates inside the borehole to understand the ground's thermal properties. If they find that the rock retains heat well, Eureka. They can build a system that pulls out the building's excess heat, pumps it into the ground in the form of hot fluid, and then pumps it back into the building when it gets cold out. And if they find the rock can store lots of heat, they'll design a new geothermal energy network so campus buildings can share each other's recycled heat. Soga says such a system could one day heat and cool the whole campus, and he's got his engineering students working on the design as part of their coursework. So I want the students to learn how this particular method can be scaled up, which is often used for residential houses. Each house may have one or two boreholes, but if we can scale it up. But also, it's not just ground stored heat pump system. They can also use solar or other renewable technology and combine together to achieve the zero carbon target that we have. We have a target of having zero carbon energy for our buildings by the year 2035 or sooner. We really have to do something, and we have to do something soon. And why would we reinvest in some old technology when we have this opportunity to be Berkeley and to really do something innovative and something that aligns with state, national, international goals around reducing carbon emissions. Berkeley students have donated much of the funding for this drilling experiment through the Green Initiative Fund. And if the geothermal project works, this new source of energy will be far cleaner and cheaper than striking oil.