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I remember Power Engineering magazine having a glowing report on a power plant going in in New Mexico which would use geo-thermal.

They figured what they needed, bought the equipment including the turbine-generator, set it all up, drilled the hole.

All the equipment was up for sale in a later edition of the magazine. They didn’t get enough heat out of the hole to make anything work.

All the equipment was up for sale in a later edition of the magazine. They didn’t get enough heat out of the hole to make anything work.

Irrelevant. The main thing is that a Secretary of Energy, a passel of Undersecretaries, Assistant Secretaries, Deputy Assistant Undersecretaries, and Directors, not to mention a planeload of congressmen, got to spend 4-6 years on an A-list conference circuit, jetting around the world to saving the planet conferences at five-star hotels. This is the basic UN/international NGO/inter-governmental working group model. The success of the underlying project is actually quite a secondary concern, and in any event ought not to occur too quickly, before everyone has sated their wanderlust.

All the equipment was up for sale in a later edition of the magazine. They didn’t get enough heat out of the hole to make anything work.

I used to read Power Engineering! Haven't seen it in a long time.

I still find it almost unbelievable that they have combined-cycle plants having thermal efficiencies near 60%. I distinctly remember one of my college professors saying that we would probably never see 50% in our lifetimes.

That's a funny story about the New Mexico geo-thermal plant.

There was a story some years back (here at FR) about a guy who had been hired by the University of California system install revolutionary power-generation equipment in all their campuses state-wide.

He was going to install large-scale PV plants, as well as fuel-cell and micro-turbines driven by biogas.

The story was about how he was being fired because he spent an incredible amount of money, putting the project way over budget, and had delivered only a paltry amount of actual power to any campus.

I've tried a couple of times to find that story and the person's name, but have been unable to do so using Google. It's almost like he's been scrubbed from the internet. Which, knowing how the owners of Google feel about green energy, wouldn't really surprise me.