USA:

President Obama Requests An Additional $41 Million for Geothermal Energy

Proposed budget is 74% increase from 2015 spending

President Barack Obama’s has announced his proposed budget for fiscal 2016, beginning next Oct. 1. For the U.S. Department of Energy he is asking for discretionary spending of $30 Billion to support development in the areas of nuclear security, clean energy, environmental cleanup, climate change response, science and innovation. Included is a request for an additional $41 Million for the Geothermal Technologies program.

The budget figures for the Geothermal Technologies program are:

• 2014 actual spending: $44.8 Million 
• 2015 estimated spending: $55 Million 
• 2016 requested spending: $96 Million

The detailed budget estimates for the DoE includes the following relevant language:

The goal of the Geothermal Technologies Program is to make geothermal energy a fully competitive, widely available, and geographically diverse component of the national energy mix.

Geothermal Technologies subprogram objectives include technology development that will drive industry deployment of a targeted 30 GW of new undiscovered hydrothermal resources (nearly 10 times the current level of geothermal power deployment) and 100+ GW of EGS. 

The pathway for achieving these objectives includes developing new exploration tools and techniques to lower the upfront risk of geothermal resource exploration, reducing the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE) of newly developed geothermal systems—including EGS—from current costs of 22.4 cents/kilowatt hour (kWh) to 6 cents/kWh (market prices) by 2030, conducting RD&D on technologies to harness available lower temperature resources more effectively, and developing improved methods to create new EGS reservoirs. 

A number of geothermal resource categories have become cost-competitive, which allows the program to target RD&D efforts on lowering the cost and risk of developing greenfield EGS, both blind and known hydrothermal resources, as well as greenfield low temperature.