- Given funds for research, geothermal energy locked in the Himalayas could be safely exploited
- India, Nepal and Tibet fall in a ‘geothermal province’ holding several thousand megawatts
- Geothermal energy can reduce the use of fossil fuels for heating in the Himalayan winters
Thousands of megawatts of geothermal energy remain locked up in the Himalayas because of environmental considerations and lack of investment in research, say international geologists.
“I hope lessons from elsewhere in the world can help harness these resources in the Himalayas,” Joe Moore, a geologist at the Energy and Geosciences Institute, University of Utah and GRC Member, told a conference on sustainable resource development held last month (June) in Leh, Jammu and Kashmir state, India.
“The hottest and best known of the geothermal systems are in Jammu and Kashmir, which form part of the northwest Himalayan ‘geothermal province’ that extends through Nepal and Tibet,” Moore says.
