MIT Thinks Heat Can Do The Trick
I love the idea but the reality continues to surface. Geothermal is suited for very specific regions. What I don’t understand is why oil companies, with their already deep wells, don’t get in the game. Conflict of interest, perhaps?
According to some smart people at MIT:
A comprehensive new MIT-led study of the potential for geothermal energy within the United States has found that mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth’s hard rock crust could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in the future, probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact.
I’m as big a fan of alternative sources of energy as the next greenie, but making over-realistic statements doesn’t help anyone. Given ANY sustainable fuel there is probably enough of it to power all of humanity (the old one percent statement, “if only one percent could be harvested”). OK, why isn’t it?
I don’t buy all the conspiracy theories. Note that much like misleading articles I use qualifiers like “all” (others use “probably”). Sometimes it is just unreasonable. The reasoning can be practical – to capture enough wave power would impede shipping. The reasoning can be financial – to capture the energy of x requires the investment of y, not even close to current costs.
So have these people hit upon a new idea? Not that I can tell. They just did a study, and studies seem to beget studies, Granted, in the real world, studies are very important. Sadly, studies have been subterfuged to represent what the people who pay for them want them to say. A free market may be a brutal market but subsidies create an artificial market. Yes, there are places for subsidies but this gets very complicated very fast.
I’m not impressed with most of this but perhaps you will see it differently.
- Posted in : Renewable Energy
- Author :Rt
Comments»
Geothermal as a large scale electricity generation method only works in some areas, but geothermal heat pumps for heating individual buildings works just about any place. I know of at least one installed on Cape Cod MA. Not the place you would think to find geothermal activity. Its no Iceland, but it has more than enough geothermal heat to heat a very large Woods Hole research building.
Small scale geothermal heat pumps will work for a majority of the people in America.
Ah, there are at least two uses for geothermal energy, The turbine driving steam kind and the home warming/cooling kind.
When it comes to turbine driving I don’t know why the sun doesn’t win – variability? The sun is awfully warm.
That said the Earth is an very neutral place – you can dump heat into it and you can extract heat from it, but it is a terrible place to store heat. It tries to balance all the internal and external influences,
The easiest place to reap that benefit, it appears, is just below the surface.
Living in a warm climate I have longed for a cooling unit that dumped the heat into my water. Water has enormous capacity for heat and I tend to heat the stuff (cooking or bathing) anyway.
There must be some safety (coolants mixing with house water, perhaps) because I can’t think of another reason this hasn’t taken off.
The same doesn’t seem to be true for the ground. I think this is justifiably so. Drinking water is more important than coolant air (as opposed to the air you breathe).
I still hold hope for geothermal, but like everything else there is a use and abuse,
There are a lot of reasons why something hasn’t “taken off yet.” One of the main reasons is that people are ignorant to its existence, or the people who create heating and cooling systems don’t know how to install it, or both.
I feel like your premise of “if the market hasn’t embraced it yet, it must have some fatal flaw” is flawed logic in itself. Geothermal heating and cooling is viable almost anywhere.
The earth is a wonderful place to store heat, as most of what is under your feet is filled with water. it’s true that the earth is not as warm as the sun, but the sun is 8 light minutes away in the cold dark void of space. And it goes down every night. Geothermal heat sources are pretty constant and with proper use renewable.
As for safety hazards with drinking water and geothermal heating, there is no safety risk to drinking water. Home scale geothermal systems pump plain old water into the earth, and pump out plain old water. They are more like small wells than anything else. They are closed systems that never interact with domestic drinking water, in fact you can make closed loop systems that don’t even interact with the ground water. They use heat exchangers to move the heat around.
Check out the FAQ on geothermal heating for more info.
“I feel like your premise of “if the market hasn’t embraced it yet, it must have some fatal flaw” is flawed logic in itself.”
I believe the MIT research was dealing with large scale eletricity generating facilities so we’re getting a bit off topic by including residential geothermal but we can go there.
I believe the most cost effective residential “geothermal” use is simply putting earth berms against the house walls. Tons, literally, of insulation there – very effective.
Next most cost effective is running underground pipe to provide an air source for your heat pump. This too has been known to dramatically reduce energy use.
The water injection would be last on my list for small applications. That said there is the economy of scale – the more you build the cheaper they get.
All sites can utilize geothermal but at some sites it works more betterer :)
We’re putting a modular house up on the Cape, right next to a pond. We’d love to use geothermal but I don’t know of any contractors in the arera who are doing it. I know the technology has been around for awhile but I don’t know if it has been used in this area, except at the new Woods Hole Research facility.
Can anyone help us with this project, or point us in the right direction?