How a climate activist teamed up with a gas utility to steer them toward renewable energy 

Underground pipes and wells tap geothermal energy to heat and cool a neighborhood. Next stop, the world. Zeyneb Magavi, executive director of Home Energy Efficiency Team (HEET), poses for a portrait at the organizaton’s office in Boston. HEET is a nonprofit pushing to replace natural-gas infrastructure with geothermal networks.Sophie Park for The Boston Globe/Sophie ParkThree climate activists and three gas utility executives walk into a room.It may sound like the start of a joke.However, the meeting at an Eversource boardroom outside Boston in December 2016 marked the beginning of an improbable relationship that is redefining what it means to be a gas utility. Though still in its infancy, the work is beginning to transform how communities across the Commonwealth, the country, and the world can heat and cool their homes without fossil fuels.The odds of anything productive coming out of that discussion seemed low. Prior to the meeting, the activists had “categorically attacked” the entire gas industry by calling out locations of hundreds of gas leaks across the city of Cambridge, according to Zeyneb Magavi, one of those three women.Before the two groups sat down together, Bill Akley, then president of Eversource’s gas operations, was asked if he needed security and lawyers to join him and his colleagues in the boardroom. Akley passed, but assumed he was in for an earful.“My expectations were, it’s going to be a list of demands and a lot of poking at all the things we’re doing wrong,” he said in a recent speech recalling the event.Instead, Eversource ended up working with the two groups, Mothers Out Front and HEET, to find and plug the biggest gas leaks in Cambridge.But plugging those leaks was still a Band-Aid, said Magavi, 51, now executive director of HEET, a Boston nonprofit working to develop neighborhood-scale geothermal heating and cooling systems.To really address climate change, people would have to stop burning fossil fuels. A climate law Massachusetts passed in 2021 effectively requires that by 2050. However, until recently, no one had articulated how to get homes off gas without laying off an entire industry of workers or leaving low-income ratepayers on the hook for maintaining a dwindling system of underground pipes.HEETAlly Rzesa/Globe StaffNow HEET, working closely with Eversource and other utilities, may have found a way. The simple logic: laying pipes is laying pipes, regardless of what flows through them.In June, Eversource completed a geothermal system in Framingham, that provides heating and cooling for an entire neighborhood, including public housing residents, by tapping into low-temperature thermal heat from underground wells.It was the first geothermal system ever built by a gas utility. More than that, it’s a demonstration project that could chart a new course for the industry by transitioning off gas while preserving jobs.On Dec. 3, Governor Maura Healey signed legislation allowing gas utilities to move be