Feel the Warmth

While many of us enjoy the warmth of natural hot springs around the world, I’m impressed at how the ongoing project at Chena Hot Springs may serve as a model for future small-scale, low temperature geothermal development in the future.

Geothermal seems to be the forgotten pillar in a future low-carbon economy as wind, hydro, and especially solar seem to be receiving the majority of both attention and funding programs.  This is surprising as geothermal is able to serve as a base-load power system to replace current gas, coal, and nuclear plants - supplemented with the other renewable options when the wind is blowing, sun is shining, etc.  Especially for remote communities this development model could help provide stable electricity in areas that are not economically feasible to connect to the current grid, and as drilling technologies continue to evolve larger areas of the globe are opening up to potential low temperature development using incipient Organic Rankine cycle technologies (a fancy term for using a fluid that boils at a lower temperature than water to spin the turbine).

I find it interesting that in many current government feed-in-tariff projects geothermal is left out while hydro and micro-hydro are included.  This will cause capital to flow into all renewable projects except for geothermal just at a time when we need to be developing alternative base-load technologies to wean us off of our coal power addition.  The last thing we need is for our push to alternative energy to become a ‘government farming’ exercise but a legitimate effort to making Canada a global renewable leader this decade.