I attended a beautiful wedding this past weekend (shoutout Mark & Abbie) and had a great time catching up with friends (Anthony & Spencer). And I'm sure you're thinking, "What do friends approaching their 30s talk about at the welcome party?" Wow, what a great question. I'm glad you asked.
Homeownership. The good. The bad. And the ugly. And no, I don’t own a home.
After mulling over the cost of the high-ticket items like the roof, the water heater, and the HVAC… it got me thinking. We've seen plenty of companies in Left Field solving home problems with batteries (Base Power, Impulse), but what does Mother Nature already offer? Solar panels on our roofs? Sure. Kind of ugly, but sure.
How about the HVAC? Thousands of dollars for a new one, and we’ve all heard "they aren't made like they used to be” and the line you hear when you tour an older home — "oh, the HVAC was replaced a few years ago." Suuuuuure, buddy. But even if you have a perfect unit, the temperature battle exists in every household. Too hot, too cold, and always too expensive.
This week's company is providing a solution using the very thing under your feet right now. Go ahead, look down.
Introducing Dandelion Energy. A company that’s drilling holes beneath your yard, dropping a loop of pipe, and letting the dirt under your house do the heating and cooling.
It started as a moonshot inside Alphabet’s X lab, and now it’s beneath thousands of homes, and it's about to be under entire neighborhoods.
Okay but how
Before anything else, one rule that explains this entire shebang: cold is just the absence of heat. Your refrigerator isn't pumping in cold. It's just removing the heat down to whatever temperature you set.
So in July, when you want your house at 72 and it's 95 outside, your HVAC pulls the hot air out of your house, runs it across a refrigerant, and blows the now-cooled air back through your vents. The heat it sucked up goes up and out — like the glass elevator in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Your unit isn't making "cold." It's just taking heat out of your living room and throwing it outside.
In February — we can agree, the worst month of the year — most homes solve the opposite problem by making heat from scratch. A furnace burns gas, oil, or propane, and blows air over the fire. If you've got electric heat, it's blowing air over coils. Either way, you're manufacturing warmth.
An alternative is a heat pump, which is in the logistics business (transferring heat) rather than manufacturing. It doesn't make heat; it relocates it. In colder months, it finds whatever heat exists in the outside air and moves it into your house. And when it’s real cold — like Caleb Williams Iceman cold — it can be supplemented by electric coils.
So how about the ground beneath you?
You probably already know how this works if you've been to the beach in the summer. The top layer of sand makes you dance like a monkey because you forgot your flip-flops and now you're burning your feet. But dig six inches down, and it’s much better. Dig a foot, and it's as cool as the other side of the pillow — yes, I used to have a shirt that said that. Ten feet? Couldn't tell you. But Richard, I can tell you we have a new mission for Fripp Island.
But that's the whole idea. A few feet down and the ground starts to moderate regardless of the temperature outside. Dandelion puts it at a steady 50-55 degrees year-round. January, July, doesn't freaking matter.
So the question isn't really about the equipment. It's about where your system is sending the heat, and where it's getting it from. A 95-degree afternoon, a 20-degree night, or the same 55 degrees all year.
Dandelion is going with my ideal retirement age… 55.
So what do they do? They drill. Specifically, one or two narrow holes a few hundred feet into your yard, run a ground loop of pipe filled with water, and install a heat pump inside your home.
That fluid is circulated through the loop, takes on the temperature of the earth, and eventually makes its way back to the heat pump.
In summer, heat is extracted from the air in your home and transferred into the water circulating through the ground loop. That water carries the heat underground, releases it into the 55-degree earth, and comes back cool enough to do it all over again.
In winter, the same loop runs the same route. Except now the ground is warmer than the air at the surface. So as it circulates, the water comes back up around 55 degrees, which is a lousy temperature to live in but a great one to start from. That 55-degree warmth gets compressed and heated enough to make you comfortable.
So now you’ve got a never-ending loop of water, doing the same job your HVAC does, just from a much better starting point.
The gal who started it
Kathy Hannun (cofounder). Stanford engineering, then spent seven years at X, Alphabet’s “moonshot factory,” as a Product Manager. Specifically on the Rapid Evaluation team, which, per a live job posting, is responsible for “creating and incubating X’s next moonshots.” Coming up with sci-fi ideas and running them through a due diligence process? Sign me up.
While at X, Kathy learned of geothermal heat pumps. Not exactly sci-fi technology, but an interesting concept nonetheless. Especially given how much energy US homes burn just to keep your toesy-woseys warm.
What she found wasn't a technology problem. Geothermal has worked since the 1940s. It was an installation problem. Nothing to date was built with a suburban backyard in mind. So that's what they set out to fix. Not the heat pump itself, but rather the way it gets in the ground.
She spun it out of X in 2017, and Dandelion was born.
The honest take
There is some bad news, though. For those of you who do own homes and do want this, you probably can’t have it.
Dandelion spent its first several years retrofitting existing houses, but in 2025 they pivoted toward new construction. And today the website is built for builders, not homeowners. So you likely can’t get one in your existing home. Which begs the question. Why the pivot?
Efficiency, really. Easier and way more cost-efficient to drill 100 homes in one subdivision than driving a big rig around to 100 different neighborhoods.
There’s also a second problem. New construction is slow. Bottleneck after bottleneck in an industry where everyone is competing on sticker price. Adding more time and money to drill for geothermal has to be quite the sales pitch.
But to their credit, Dandelion has had real wins. 1,500 homes with Lennar in Colorado and 129 homes in Maryland.
And as they say, money talks.
For a new home, geothermal now runs $10 to $40 a month on a 20-year lease, with nothing upfront. And per the US Department of Energy, those systems run at 300-600% efficiency on the coldest winter nights, and use 25 to 50% less energy than a standard air-source heat pump.
Which is a big part of anyone's equation. Sure, most people can get behind a system that's better for the planet. But for the majority, there has to be a dollar incentive attached to it. That's the whole reason for the pivot — new construction is where Dandelion can make the math work.
If they pull this off
Your house stops wrestling with the weather. Instead of starting from 95 or 20, it starts from a mild 55 every single day of the year.
And the bigger win if this scales? Less stress on the grid. Geothermal uses far less peak power than an air-source heat pump on the coldest days, which is exactly when everyone else is hammering the grid too. Same problem Base Power is solving with a battery outside your house. Dandelion is just coming at it from a different angle.
Scale that across the country and you've cut a real chunk of national energy demand. And lowered your own bill on the way.
All from digging some holes.
Want to work out there?
Dandelion is hiring. And it’s not really the job board you’d expect from a Google X spinout. Drillers, piping & installation helpers, CDL-A drivers in Maryland, Colorado, and New York.
But if Dandelion is going to change how we heat and cool our homes, they’re going to need all the drillers they can get.
Open roles → https://dandelionenergy.com/careers
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