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.
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.
Taiwan has announced the split of the feed-in-tariff available to geothermal power plants for sizes under and above 2 MW in installed capacity.
2023 © Wind-Works by Paul Gipe