by William Harvey, P.E., Project Engineer at POWER Engineers (GRC Member)
We see that geothermal is in a knife fight with other generation types just based on LCOE, and can still fare well at selected locations, today. But LCOE should not be the whole story, and geothermal advocates often point to the high capacity factors and relative insensitivities to diurnal or environmental variations that geothermal has, touting its baseload power capability.Does that deserve a premium? Well, it depends on the entities managing the power grid, and their plans for managing the integration of intermittent resources such as solar and wind with baseload/dispatchable resources such as hydro, fossil, biomass or geothermal. If the penetration of intermittent renewables is high, then the dispatchable resources must ramp up or down rapidly during periods such as dawn or dusk.
Read More..........
- Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - USA: GRC Member Surveys the Geothermal Energy Industry - Part Two
- Wednesday, September 6, 2017 - USA: GRC Member Surveys the Geothermal Energy Industry - Part One
