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MIT-Led Study Says Geothermal Energy Is Viable
amigoro writes to tell us about a study for the US Department of Energy, led by MIT, indicating that geothermal energy could account for 10% of energy production in the US by 2050. The study concludes that geothermal is proven, could impose markedly lower environmental impacts than fossil-fuel and nuclear power plants, and is likely to be cost-competitive with the alternatives. This coverage in LiveScience points out how big a player geothermal already is in the US: "The United States is the world's biggest producer of geothermal energy. Nafi Toksöz, a geophysicist at MIT, noted that the electricity produced annually by geothermal plants now in use in California, Hawaii, Utah, and Nevada is comparable to that produced by solar and wind power combined."
I had no idea G.T. energy was already in use in California. Just goes to show how much one knows about where his own power comes from. But to say produces more energy than Solar and Wind combined, is that really saying much?
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This doesn't seem like a viable alternative. 10% in the year 2005. Is that including forecast increases in power usage (as per population and ignoring other technological impacts). Additionally 10% isn't much overall, how can this be a viable alternative.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
*Modern* nuclear power plants are the best solution to our coal and oil dependence.
I like how the summary states that geothermal energy generation is cost-competitive with straw men like solar power, and lumps nuclear power plant environmental impact with the other straw man, fossil fuels.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
I'm fairly comfortable that we've got a long way to go to screw up the earths core temperature and/or magnetism (that's not based on any scientific knowledge, btw). It seems, however, that we could much more quickly screw up ocean currents by changing the thermal gradients that exist (again, not based on hard science numbers). Since much of our weather patterns are based on those ocean currents, I would venture that a real effort to convert to using ocean thermals to satify a larger portion of humaities need for energy could very well alter the global weather in just a few generations. Maybe the numbers don't support my gut feeling, but I would need to be convinved otherwise before I considered using ocean gradients for power.
(and yes - using the gradients means reducing said gradients - it's that whole "laws of thermodynamics" thing Homer keeps reminding Lisa about)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I visited Iceland a couple years ago, and I became sold on geothermal. I mean, Iceland is a small country, but they have fairly high power needs per capita because of the cold climate, and they run almost entirely off geothermal, as I understand it. This isn't some apologetic green technology that is decades or more from delivering affordable massive power, like solar, wind, etc. No, this is the real thing: a geothermal plant puts out power at nuclear reactor levels. And these things are clean.
My favorite part of the visit was swimming in the Blue Lagoon... a spa built alongside the runoff from a geothermal power plant. Seriously: you're in the middle of a lava rock field, and boiling hot waste water pours from the power plant into a huge outdoor pool. In the cold air you can nearly cook yourself as you swim closer to the power plant. But it's clean enough to swim in.
There are many criteria that need to be met to build a geothermal power station at a given location, but I think the research and development needed must be far less than for some other technologies, and the end result is completely proven, so the risks are minimal.
My ideal-yet-realistic world features geothermal and nuclear supplementing each other, with the preference towards geothermal.
Cheers.
I have no problem having a nuclear power plant in my "backyard", and would be more then happy if it was a fast breeder reactor that could continually burn it's fuel (as to have very little waste). If you want to get (cheap, less-polluting energy) you have to give (having production close by, being rational with regards to generation method).
Most people don't get that a coal-fired electical generation facility puts out more radiation then a nuclear power plant. Go figure.
This coming Saturday, I will be conducting a 1-hour, live interviw with Jefferson Tester, who headed this Geothermal panel and report. It will be broadcast live from 6:00 to 6:55 pm Eastern time. http://pesn.com/2007/01/22/9500449_MIT_Geothermal_ Report/
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
One thing that's notable by its absence in the article: how long will this energy last, given current energy usage? For instance, Australia (where I live) is currently exploring nuclear power. The Age ran an article a while ago, suggesting geothermal as a solution to Australia's energy needs that would last 75 years, based upon a single site in South Australia. Add more sites, and that time frame obviously goes up.
... You also can draw your power from any source you care to name, without worrying about whether it can run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All you care about is that it can supply enough power, on average, to run the cities and towns, with a sufficient surplus that you can recharge the storage reasonably quickly. When everything's working smoothly, and you have a surplus, that energy can be applied to other things - desalination, perhaps, or maybe aluminium smelting; anything that uses a lot of energy but which doesn't need it all the time is a potential sink for when the storage systems are fully charged.
The way I see it is, you build the power plants you need now, based on geothermal and similar technologies that are known to be clean and safe, even though you also know that they won't last forever. You then use those power sources to develop other fuel sources. Australia has an obvious solution: solar power. Grab some of those vast, empty tracts of land, and throw some mirrors, water pipes, and so forth thereon. Hey presto, power that's almost free for the taking (just maintenance and salary costs, more than anything else, to pay.)
Now, solar power doesn't work well at night, right? So build some power storage plants. Hydro plants (pump water up when there's a power surplus, let it run down and drive turbines when there's a deficit) work well for that. So does a solid flywheel. And the storage doesn't have to be close to the power plant. So in the most extreme version of this vision, you have your hundreds of towns and cities, each with enough power storage stations to hold the energy for 24 (or 48, or 72, or whatever) hours of demand; and your solar or wind or tidal plants elsewhere, feeding those stations.
All of a sudden, you don't need an ultra reliable transmission system spanning the entire continent. If it goes down for a couple of hours, it's no big deal. Fix it, get the power flowing again, and nobody will notice. Flywheels can be built pretty much anywhere - say, underneath the roads of the cities, out of the way of water, gas and other pipelines
Solar might not be viable in the US, but the above is still a useful blueprint for any country, regardless of how the storage systems are recharged.
We have the technology already. All we need is the political willpower to make it happen.
yeah, the GT homes really make sense. I grew up on wisc/ill border and saw -40 day and night (this was 60's and 70's). A number of the homes had heatpumps, but they were air based heat pumps. So instead, most have A.Cs (basically air based heat pumps), and gas heaters. But with the ground at a nice 55F, it has always made sense to use GT for both. On my next house, I think that it will be new and we will have them install a GT. May add an extra 5K, but worth it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The problem is that most of the designs for geothermal is to use the prevailing heat as a wet well. That is they want to not only use the heat, but the local water. If they had a recycling GT set-up, then there would be a whole lot less impact and fight. But of course, that means spending some real money. A good example was the one in Wyoming next to YellowStone. Some far right wing group set up there and built one that used the water. Funny enough they simply discarded the water rather than re-inject (too much money). Needless to say, nearby springs and gysers lost their pressure. So a court injunction was obtained and they were stopped. Once a recycling GT can be built cheap, and effectively, you will see GT springing up all over here.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Throwing nuclear waste down a 65 metre hole in the ground including fissile material and then being surprised when the cap blows off and showers the area with radioactive waste does not appear to be a responsible use of nuclear power to me. Read up on Dounreay power station in Scotland: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=12626 82002
Why did Windscale change its name to Sellafield? read up on the history of that plant. Hint: read up on the 1957 Windscale Fire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
...like they did unfortunately in Basel (Switzerland) when they made tests to use geothermic energy on a new (?) way.
They pumped water under high pressure into rocks several kilometers under the surface to further loosen the stones for later pumping of water through it. Obviously the rocks stood already under pressure which was released through the experiments and caused several earthquakes with a strength between 3.2 and 3.4 on the Richter scale - which is just strong enough to be noticed by humans.
Don't believe it? See the report on tagesschau.de (sorry - german only) from 16.01.2007 and the site of the Swiss Deep Heat Mining Project which makes the experiments.
I lag