The Good News: Geothermal Produces Baseload Power. The Bad News…..
This article on geothermal makes an important point: geothermal produces baseload power, just like coal or nuclear. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that exploration is expensive, and its success is hard to predict. When I was listening to the presentations at last fall’s Renewable Energy Finance Forum, I was surprised that Ormat CEO Dita Bronicki didn’t sugar-coat this in the slightest. Neither did company spokesperson Paul Thomsen when I interviewed him for my first book: “Renewable Energy – Facts and Fantasies.”
The issue is the cost of finding the resources, drilling, and hoping that you’re going to find sufficient temperatures in the underground reservoir – and porosity between two different points.
The upside, again, is the consistency of the power when you’re successful – along with the cleanliness and availability of the energy. The Earth won’t be running low on geothermal energy for one heck of a long time.
It is too soon to give up on geothermal, even though it has some actual problems and some potential problems.
The difficulty of finding geothermal energy is reminiscent of the problems of finding oil in earlier times; it was pretty much luck when they happened to drill in the right place. Eventually, scientific methods of locating oil were developed which greatly increased the probability that oil would be found when an exploratory well was drilled. It may be that in the future, finding sources of geothermal power will become more scientific.
There is still the problem of causing earthquakes when extracting geothermal energy. Unless that problem can be solved, or unless sufficient geothermal energy can be found in areas where earthquakes wouldn’t matter, that could be a show stopper.
In some cases, it has been found that continuously extracting geothermal energy eventually causes the source to dry up.
In spite of the problems, it may be that at some future date, geothermal systems will be able to provide reliable and economical power that is able to compete with other sources. It is too soon to know.
Above All, Should we preserve it? for later.(It may be interesting to note that the world need to keep So many technologies ready in so many Places to address the unpredictability that haunt us today – say If Ethanol can not be produced due to weather in one part of the world, Another part of the world is not ready with even a legislation or Quick production despite high sugarcane output)