Allan Hoffman, Senior Analyst at U.S. Department of Energy (retired) writes about geothermal energy in his blog, Thoughts of a Lapsed Physicist. He has an interesting take on the history of Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS) in the USA.
In the mid 1990′s, when geothermal was one of the renewable energy programs I managed, I met in San Francisco with the heads of all U.S. geothermal power companies to discuss the technology’s future. It was a time of financial difficulty for the companies, limited Congressional budgets for renewables, and hard decisions had to be made on how to support a broad range of emerging technologies with federal funds.
All at the meeting agreed that while hydrogeothermal was the basis of their existing businesses geothermal’s future was in hot dry rock. Not willing or able to have DOE support geothermal development close to 100 percent into the future, as had been true for many years, and being a strong believer in cost sharing to advance commercialization, I offered to meet the industry half-way on further EGS development – 50 percent DOE funding, matched by 50 percent industry funding – and to issue an RFP (Request For Proposals) committing DOE to that arrangement.
Unfortunately, not one company submitted a proposal in response to the RFP (times were tough and anticipated energy costs from EGS were high) and I was forced to terminate the hot dry rock program. Today EGS is looking to be much more commercially attractive.
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