Despite the offerings, deployment of geothermal energy continues to remain a challenge mainly due to limited flexibility, large capital expenditures and, scaling issues, thus limiting its exploitation as opposed to the wind and solar power generation. In the context of GeoSmart project, the consortium aims to optimise and demonstrate innovations to improve the flexibility and efficiency of geothermal heat and power systems, specifically:
- Energy storage and power block management innovations to provide daily flexibility;
- Integration of more flexible Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) systems that can cope with variations in needs in the electricity markets;
- Combined Heat and Power (CHP) supplier to extract more heat from the post-generator ("waste" heat) brine outflows when required for increased heating supply during colder weather.
The GeoSmart consortium includes 19 partners across Europe including TWI (UK), VITO (Belgium), Zorlu Energy (Turkey), CEA (France), Atlas Copco (Belgium), EGEC (Belgium), Fraunhofer (Germany), Spike Renewables (Italy), ON power (Iceland), University of Iceland (Iceland), Middle East Technical University (Turkey), BERTIN (France), Gerosion (Iceland), Kadir Has University (Turkey), Technovative solutions (UK), Flowphys (UK), PVALD (Iceland), COSVIG (Italy) and Innovation Centre Iceland (Iceland).
