Science & Technology:

Opinion: Why Geothermal Energy Will Remain A Small Player (Oil Price.com)

Geothermal is presently a minor player in the field of renewable energy and for the reasons discussed here is likely to remain one, but Energy Matters has never featured it before and it deserves its fifteen minutes of fame. Besides, I worked in geothermal a number of years ago and haven’t revisited it since, so it’s time I updated myself on what’s been going on.

I start with a bit of personal memorabilia. Above is an aerial view of the Hudson Ranch 1 plant in the Salton Sea geothermal field, California, a three-stage flash plant with an installed capacity of 49.9 MW that was commissioned in 2012. I show it because I bought the land the plant sits on for my then employer Kennecott Copper Corporation in 1980, knowing that a high-temperature geothermal resource was present there. What I didn’t figure on is that it would take 32 years to put it into production.

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