
Policy Case Study on the WARMTH Act
Maryland House Delegate Lorig Charkoudian walks through the WARMTH Act, a piece of state legislation built around geothermal energy networks (GENs), as part of MIT's IAP 2025 course on geothermal thermal energy systems taught with HEET. She covers how the bill moved through pilots and programs, what legislative language was needed to let utilities build shared geothermal loops, and what practical and political obstacles came up along the way. The session treats the bill as a working example of how climate infrastructure policy actually gets written and passed, rather than a theoretical overview, drawing on her own experience shepherding it through the Maryland legislature. It sits within a larger MIT OpenCourseWare series on geothermal networks, aimed at students and practitioners who want to see the regulatory side of a technology usually discussed in engineering terms. Running about fourteen minutes, it is a short but concrete look at the legal and administrative machinery behind a specific clean energy policy.