Tag: geothermal electric power generation

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Business, Greenwashing, Innovation, Technology Tagged with , ,

“If the US could capture just 2% of the thermal energy available two to six miles beneath its surface, it could produce more than 2,000 times the nation’s total annual energy consumption.”

Geothermal Borehole outside Reykjavik, Iceland (Public Domain photo by Yomangani)
Geothermal Borehole outside Reykjavik, Iceland (Public Domain photo by Yomangani)

This COULD be very exciting, a breakthrough in evening the highly variable load capacity of renewables (depending on how much sun is shining and how much wind is blowing).

BUT…

1) It essentially repurposes fracking technology, which has been linked to huge environmental problems from water contamination to accidentally induced earthquakes. The article does (eventually) touch on the earthquake risk, but makes it sound like that problem has been eliminated. As far as I know, both of these issues are still real.

2) The article does not address the consequences if the water pressure buildup gets out of control. What happens if there are explosions in the drill cavity, which can extend 8000 feet deep and 4000 feet (about 3/4 of a mile) long.

Still, I’m glad to see people exploring this, and potentially making geothermal economically viable in places it’s hasn’t been until now.

PS: I visited Iceland in 2011. Pretty much the entire country’s non-vehicular energy use is renewable: a mix of volcano-based geothermal and large-scale hydro. And it was exporting power to mainland Europe!

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , ,

No, I haven’t forgotten you! I was on vacation in Iceland, and had very limited access to Internet.

I’ve known for years that Iceland is a geothermal paradise, but to see it in person was quite amazing. Everywhere we went, there were geothermal hotsprings. Everywhere, there were geothermally heated municipal swimming pools and hot tubs (one of the few bargains in a rather expensive country). We visited a geothermal power plant that contained an energy museum. We enjoyed hot, hot showers, as hot as our solar-heated system at home (we saw almost no solar in Iceland, in part because usually they don’t have too much sun, and in part because geothermal is readily available and produces much steadier power).
We cooked eggs in a geothermal spring, and tasted bread that had been baked in the ground, overnight.

One surprise for me was how much geothermal power is used to create steam and spin turbines to generate electricity; I’d expected most of it to be heating water for direct use rather than spinning turbines, because that cuts down on efficiency.

But efficiency and conservation aren’t such big concerns in Iceland. We were rather surprised that conserving water or electricity didn’t seem to be a value. People just ran the water or left lights on.

But that can change with education and a values shift. Meanwhile, Iceland can truly claim to have one of the greenest power grids in the world.

In a country with only 318,452 inhabitants as of January 2011 and approximately 116,000 households, this tiny country has the capacity to supply much of Europe’s energy needs. In fact, plans are afoot to build deep-sea cables that will export as much as 5 billion kilowatt-hours of clean, renewable electricity to the rest of Europe—enough to power 1.25 million homes.

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