Geothermal Heat Pump Business Up 50% In Canada

Canada's Geothermal heat pump sales have grown an astounding 50% since last year, and it' s helping to boost the growth of US companies too. Indiana based Waterfurnace Renewable Energy reported in August that offsetting the U.S. housing crunch, they have seen a surge in sales north of the border.

"Canadian sales were up 119 per cent versus the same quarter last year. Ontario has grown the most. It's up 200 per cent," said Waterfurnace CEO, Bruce Ritchie.

Their second quarter sales soared to $31.3 million. "It's a phenomenal number, especially if you keep in mind that it's only for retrofits, and only retrofits that have applied for government incentives."

And that installing a heat pump can set you back $25,000 or so, though Canadians can qualify for between $8,000 and $9,000 in energy efficiency rebates. Ritchie attributes the Canadian growth to strong government incentives, a healthier economy, and increased environmental awareness. And those cold winters, I'll bet factor in there somewhere.

No matter what climate you live in, you can benefit from using less energy to heat or cool your house, if your temperatures vary throughout the year. For some climates that means blazing summers and frigid winters. What many people don't realize is that the temperature below ground actually stays fairly consistent all year. The ground is able to maintain a more consistent temperature because it absorbs about half of the suns heat as it hits the Earth's surface. Geothermal systems tap into this stable earth temperature to create a free supply of warmth in winter and cool temperatures in summer to reduce the additional energy needed to heat or cool your home.

Via Clean Break
Diagram from After Gutenberg
For Matternetwork Read more...

Japanese Hotsprings Resort Protests Geothermal Power

Local tourism workers fear that nearby geothermal drilling could dry up tourist supply for Kusatsu's famous hotsprings resort

About 1,100 residents of tourist town Kusatsumachi held a protest rally against a plan to build a geothermal power generation plant 2 miles from their famous Kusatsu Onsen (hot springs) resort. More than 90 percent of the villagers earn their living from tourism-related jobs. Gathering around the town's symbolic natural thermal well, they waved fans bearing slogans such as "Geothermal power generation dries up our hot springs," and "Protect Japan's hot spring bath culture."

Natural hot water at the Kusatsu Onsen hot spring resort is scalding hot and cannot be used for bathing.

In the town's hot spring baths, a practice called yumomi--stirring up hot water to lower the temperature--is preferred over adding cold water, which thins minerals in the hot water believed to be healthful.

Ironically, this practice of yumoni wastes heat energy, but geothermal power generation would more efficiently utilize such wasted power. That's because in modern geothermal development, steam is turned to liquid water and reused, without negatively affecting nearby hot springs.

The earliest geothermal projects, in New Zealand, did not reinject fluids back for reuse. Initially only about 10 percent was returned to the earth. As a result, in Wairaki: the second geothermal development in the world the hot pools have been depleted by geothermal drilling. Only 10 percent had been reused. Reinjection began purely as a disposal method, but has now been recognised as an essential part of reservoir management.

Japan could more than double current geothermal electricity supply if it harnessed all the untapped thermal energy from 1,591 hot spots nationwide, and this can be done while also protecting their hot springs for resorts when the fluids are reinjected after use. Currently Japan is fifth in the world in geothermal power.

Via Yomiuri Online
Photography by Marc Veraart

For Matternetwork Read more...

Geothermal Projects Up 20% Since January

The Geothermal Energy Association has released a new report which shows a 20% increase since January of new projects starting in the US. Iceland and Tibet currently power the highest percentage of their electricity from Geothermal sources - 25% and 30% of each nations power comes from Geothermal energy respectively. Geothermal energy today meets the total electricity needs of some 60 million people worldwide, roughly the population of the United Kingdom.

The new projects underway will power 4 million homes with 4000 megawatts of geothermal power. The report lists projects being started in 14 states, mostly in the Pacific Rim states but also, surprisingly, Florida.

Volcanic areas are typically those that best tap Geothermal potential such as Iceland which is the world leader in the percentage of its electricity that comes from Geothermal power. Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. When developed, these projects could provide nearly 4,000 megawatts (MW) of new electric power, enough electricity to meet the needs of roughly 4 million homes.

Of these projects, 45 will be in Nevada, 21 in California, 11 in Oregon, Idaho and Utah will have 6 each, 5 in Alaska, 2 each for Arizona and Hawaii, and Washington, Colorado, Wyoming and Florida will each have one project. With the new additions, US geothermal power will be close to 7,000 MW.

Google is investing $11 million in Geothermal power, and also has previously invested in electric vehicles powered by Lithium, a side product of Geothermal drilling.

From Renewable Energy World
and the Geothermal Energy Association

Photo by Phil Mercer

For Matter

Read more...

Google Brings Cheap Energy From Earth

Arguably Google has done far more to change civilization than the Gutenberg Press, in bringing free research to the world and thus opening up the vast wealth of all of our collective intellectual endeavours to all of us. Now they would appear to be performing a similarly game-changing service: investing in a neglected, cheap, clean and abundant source of energy.

Google plans to invest $11 Million in EGS (deep) Geothermal power this year. (By contrast, the Bush DOE has once again zeroed out Geothermal investment.) "It's a big resource, it's got a good cost curve, and it's not getting enough attention," says Dan W. Reicher, Google.org's director of climate and energy initiatives. This investment in Geothermal would be a good fit with Google's previous investments in electric vehicles, because an easily extractable byproduct of Geothermal drilling is lithium.

Forbes says that a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated EGS could open up an additional 100,000 megawatts of generating capacity in the U.S. by 2050, up from 2,000 MW today. That could mean 800 million megawatt-hours of more power every year, up from just 15 million megawatt-hours today.

Initial extraction costs (including construction, development and financing) would be 9 cents, even with no subsidies that might well become available under a hopefully more pro-renewable administration. Once production is underway, costs drop by more than half.

The ongoing cost for Geothermal power is estimated at 4 cents. This compares extremely well with new nuclear power at 18 to 30 cents, or natural gas at 9.3 cents and would be almost as cheap as coal, currently at about 2 cents, a figure which is likely to increase as carbon legislation forces older facilities to either close or retrofit for carbon capture.

The cost of Geothermal is falling faster than the cost of fossil fuels, including coal. While geothermal’s costs have steadily decreased throughout the years, those of natural gas have increased recently, often experiencing boom and bust type cycles that can negatively impact the economy. EIA analysis places geothermal energy at a lower levelized cost than Natural Gas Combined-Cycle, Wind, Open-Loop Biomass, Nuclear, Solar Thermal, and Photovoltaic (with costs increasing in the order in which they are listed).

Most industry experts agree that Geothermal is one of only a few alternative technologies that will compete economically with polluting technologies in the near term.

Photo By Guillermo Santamaria

For MatterNetwork Read more...

Got Lithium?

A new paper on the Recovery of Minerals and Metals from Geothermal Fluids has some great news for those of us hoping we can green up our drives in 2010 with lithium-powered electric vehicles. There is a real symbiotic relationship between geothermal power and the battery electric car.

Geothermal fluids contain significant concentrations of potentially valuable mineral resources. This paper focuses on extracting silica, lithium and zinc, the resources that have the greatest potential to be economically extracted. Mineral content was often considered more a nuisance than an asset, because they can cause corrosive scaling both in the plant and in reinjection wells, which creates operational limitations in Geothermal power plants.

We will need these minerals, especially lithium, for powering the batteries for the many electric vehicles that are due on the market in the next few years. The lithium automotive market could reach $1.6 Billion by 2015 .

Many constituents of geothermal fluids are valuable if they can be separated and purified. The geothermal waters have had intimate and lengthy contact with the layers of the earth’s crust that they flow through, resulting in dissolution of minerals and metals from the rocks, and solution into the hot water. These aqueous solutions can be processed to recover minerals and metals, such as silica, zinc and lithium.

Mineral recovery improves the economics of geothermal energy production by helping to minimize the nuisance of corrosive scaling, and there is now increasing interest in improving the economics of geothermal energy by co-producing and marketing some of the dissolved constituents: in particular the easiest to extract economically, which turn out to be silica, zinc and lithium.

In the early history of geothermal resource development, boric acid, sulfur, and ammonium salts were recovered commercially until they lost economic competitiveness to other mining processes.

Although the enrichment of target elements in geothermal fluids is not as high as the enrichment in fluids commonly treated with hydrometallurgical methods, the costs associated with resource extraction from geothermal fluids are potentially low for several reasons:

Plant costs are split between power and mineral production. Geothermal power plants already pump and process the fluids. Mineral extraction would consist of an additional treatment step added to existing plant facilities and would be economically feasible for several reasons.

1. There are no costs associated with mining and physical processing of the ore, and no negative environmental impacts;
2. There are no costs associated with dissolution of ore minerals into an aqueous phase because they are already in solution;
3. Geothermal systems process large volumes of water, commonly tens of millions of gallons per day, so that the mass of mineral resource is large in spite of relatively low concentrations.

This is good news. Lithium for all our electric vehicles could be readily mined along with clean geothermal energy to supply the sockets in our garages the juice to power our plug in vehicles.

Photo by WorldIslandInfo

For MatterNetwork

Read more...