Category: Renewable Energy (Page 2 of 4)

During this year’s Geothermal Resources Council annual meeting, it was great to sit down with Alex Richter of ThinkGeoEnergy, an informative blog about geothermal energy. The discussion is linked here.

The questions were not provided in advance, so those were my frank and initial reactions to those themes. Not that there is any change in my thoughts subsequently, but it might be useful to provide some background on those positions in more detail as they might relate to you.

There are five points that merit some elaboration:

1. Legacies
2. The GeoVision Report
3. Modularity and the Evil Empire
4. ThinkGeo Benefits
5. Krushchev

Let’s step through each. The times in the video are provided for where the various discussions start.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Geothermal Technologies Office’s (GTO) GeoVision Report (“GVR”), released earlier in 2019, has all sorts of tidbits that may be appetizing to international geothermalists. For the sake of interested renewable energy students or professionals that might balk at reading the entire 218 page, seemingly U.S.-focused document, I pulled some key points out for contemplation that have wider geographic applicability. Refer to this LinkedIn post here for more details. Naturally it would be best to read the whole thing, but the post is a start.

Something refreshing is that ThinkGeo reposted the article and “riffed” on it with more interpretation and a new figure. You can find that link here. They included a Sankey diagram showing the proportions of total potential geothermal energy that flows to various uses. I appreciated their not simply reposting the article as is, but instead taking some time to reflect on what other ideas it generated, and coming up with yet another way to visualize data.

One of the most important tables in the GeoVision report is Table 3-3, which sets out basic design criteria for the various scenarios in the report. If a student is looking for reasonable and current starting data reference for a mini-study, regarding performance and economics, they could do worse than looking at the Table 3-3 assumptions. Would include it here, but then people really should delve into the full report.

If anyone happens to be at the Geothermal Resources Council Annual meeting this year (15-18 September in Palm Springs) and wants to chat about GeoVision or other topics, stop by the POWER Engineers booth and ask for me. It looks like we are right around the corner from the Department of Energy and the primary authors of the report. I’ll be around and always enjoy talking power plants and careers.

Last year leading up to the big U.S. geothermal conference I was asked to write a series of LinkedIn articles regarding the industry. That series was called “Insights,” and collected observations about trends overall with the industry over the past several decades. It seemed useful to construct that in sort of a past/present/future perspective; to step back from the day-to-day and try to identify trends over a longer term of several decades.

This year we took a different tack. As something of a techno-archivist, I study the gradual accumulation and trends of technologies, but also of cultures. In the case of geothermal plants one can, with a bit of imagination, see something of the natural character of a region expressed in their features. People proud of their national heritage but not used to seeing it expressed through industrial facilities might find this of interest. Students ready to step into their engineering careers might recognize through these portrayals that they are joining a profession that has a long and strong history of contributions.

Tractors? Huh?

So, give this Heritage series a read if so inclined. It’s built on three countries with which I have some years of experience: Turkey, Iceland and the United States of America.

Continue reading