News on Geothermal – WIND WORKS

Hs orka geothemal power plants. reykjanesvirkjum (reykjenes power plant).

The report itself is wide-ranging. It opens with a foreword that admits the challenge of writing honestly about geothermal. It is an industry where geology, engineering, and economics intersect in messy ways, and where enthusiasm can run well ahead of evidence. From there the report walks through the core technologies, beginning with conventional geothermal generation. In the right geographies this remains an excellent source of low-carbon power, running at capacity factors that fossil plants envy. Yet the geography is limited, and in most parts of the world geothermal electricity will never be more than a rounding error.

When China starts scaling a technology at massive levels, the rest of the world should take notice. That’s not a geopolitical statement, it’s a thermodynamic and logistical one. China doesn’t mess around when it comes to heat, power, and infrastructure. And in the case of ground-source heat pumps used for district heating, China has been quietly laying down tens of thousands of systems, with over 77 GW of installed capacity by 2019.

It’s unclear what geothermal’s path forward is outside of conventional geothermal where it’s viable and heating and cooling provision with heat pumps. The capital costs of the unconventional forms mean they have to run at 90% capacity factors. While they might technically be able to be load following in the future, that’s not something that they will be able afford to do. They have to compete with much cheaper batteries for grid firming in any event, and natural gas peakers can’t do that any more, as California along with a lot of other jurisdictions are demonstrating. They can’t be built on the same footprints as coal plants and get anywhere near the GW scale capacity, so can’t claim effective reuse of boilers, turbines and transmission assets that are left behind.

Hs orka geothemal power plants. svartsengisfell power plant.

Conventional geothermal electrical generation, where conditions are right, is an excellent form of renewable generation. It keeps chugging along day and night, offering firmed power with some of the highest capacity factors in the business and very low emissions per MWh. Yet, despite its many advantages, geothermal often gets left out of the clean energy conversation. Let’s dig into this a bit.

Historically, geothermal energy has been repeatedly touted as the renewable savior — clean, reliable, and providing essential baseload power right beneath our feet. However, despite periodic waves of excitement, actual global growth has been modest at best. As the current wave of enthusiasm builds, it’s prudent to ask: will this geothermal revival finally deliver, or is history poised to repeat itself?

By contrast the IEA grossly underestimated increases in renewable energy generation. As can be seen in the Figure 1 below, reproduced from a recently published academic paper the IEA has had a consistent habit of projecting much smaller increases in world solar PV generation than has happened in practice. The vertical axis represents annual solar PV additions in GW. The IEA projections consistently have solar pv capacity more or less levelling off in the future, whereas in reality there has been exponential growth of the technology.

The ground-source heat pump system began delivering heated and cooled water to the BSU campus in 2012. A decade in … Read more

After achieving success in the grocery business, Shoji Numata is adapting the franchise model to help grow the geothermal industry in Japan.

More than 60% of the respondents believed that a feed-in tariff (61%), Contracts for Difference (CfD) for heat (61%), and capital grants (67%) would support the industry.

The Turkish authorities have set a 10-year feed-in tariff (FIT) of TRY 1.06 ($0.0545)/kWh for PV systems that are installed between July 1, 2021, and December 31, 2030. Solar projects with Turkish PV components will be given an additional five-year tariff of TRY 0.2880/kWh.