Since we have lava on zzhora, we can throw spoilage into the lava and are not dependent on heating towers. For power production the vulcanus-style of turning sulfuric acid into steam is the most efficient (and for early kickstarting one can use simple boilers and steam engines.)

My suggestion would be to put the heating tower in the gleba science research tree.

Sounds like a good suggestion. I'll be going through next week to make a couple of updates, I'll try to include this as part of that. Thank!