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Posted on 10/12/2007 1:28:00 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
What do Icelanders know about heat?
Quite a lot, it turns out. For 70 years, the chilly island nation has been tapping the Earth's warmth -- using geothermal energy to heat buildings and swimming pools, melt snow and generate more than a quarter of the country's electricity.
And now they've come to California to share the knowledge.
The effort will be formally launched today in downtown Los Angeles, where Iceland President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson and a handful of city and state officials will openthe new headquarters of Iceland America Energy, the company that will lead Iceland's geothermal push in North America.
"It's really kind of unusual when you have this small country that's coming in and helping the United States develop this resource," said Curt Robinson, executive director of the Geothermal Resources Council, a nonprofit educational and scientific group based in Davis, Calif. "But they've been using geothermal in applied ways for several decades, very successfully. . . they have a fully developed energy economy and we don't."
While California struggles toward its ambitious goal of deriving 20% of its power from renewable sources by 2010, Iceland has already accomplished that and more, albeit on a much smaller scale. The country is almost completely powered from renewable sources -- 73.4% of it hydropower and 26.5% geothermal.
Last year, the company signed a contract with Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to provide the San Francisco-based utility with 49 megawatts of power from a geothermal plant to be built near Truckhaven in Imperial County. The California Energy Commission chipped in a $700,000 grant to help fund the first well, which will be drilled next week.
The plant, which is expected to provide enough power to serve nearly 40,000 homes, is slated to open in 2010.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
There are probably good reasons that Iceland uses geothermal based energy. The availability of geothermal, the cost of utilizing the energy sources, and the cost of alternatives may make geothermal a good choice in Iceland. Those factors probably do not play well for California unless the energy czars (dims and Arnold) decree otherwise. If the economics make sense, allow private industry to develop geothermal energy production. Private industry does not need any subsidies or mandates unless it is to counter all of the other subsidies and mandates provided to the other favored forms of energy production. The solution is to remove the other subsidies and mandates, not add new ones.
Oddly enough, I followed some of this years ago:
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b3b87db46af.htm
Geothermal- Promising Power, or dead-end dillema?
Published: 06-28-01 Author: backhoe
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Yes--the whole island sits on an active volcano. But there are very few sites in the US where geothermal is simultaneously near enough to the surface and close enough to population centers for easy transmission.
Somehow, I don't think they'll back geothermal development in Yellowstone.
POWER BY HELL
That sounds good to me- I diss France as much as anybody, but after that damnable Arab Oil Embargo in '73, they did exactly what we should have done- embarked on the Super Phoenix reactor program, and reduced their dependency on those thieves in the middle east.
We should have pulled out all the stops long ago for nuclear, clean coal, geothermal and hydroelectric power.
The Enviormentalist have us in a stranglehold....
Hey, let's be like Iceland and dam our rivers to generate hydro power!!
OK, I'm sitting down...
The earth's subsurface is losing about 30 terawatts per day; energy that will never be restored. Oil is being created continuously. Yet, geothermal energy is called "renewable" and oil isn't.
OK, call me a nit-witted nit-picking geek, but IMO words should mean things and in this case the word renewable seems to have nothing to do with renewing anything.
It is?
I saw this in a science fiction story.
They crack open the earth, which then splits and explodes with only a handful of humans escaping in a rocket to nowhere.
This is all just a ploy to make Hillary!! homesick.....
I am not impressed either. But facts will not stand in the way of the energy czars!
Let's take the example noted in the article, California's goal of getting 20% of it's energy from so-called "renewable" sources. Say by some miracle they reach that goal. OK, fine, so where do they go for the other 80% of their needs? This is what really irks me. We haven't addressed the vast majority of the problem. We've solved one-fifth of it. The other four-fifths have to be supplied by "other" sources.
Of course, it's all the more ironic because the solution is staring them right in the face. We could increase our share of nuclear-generated electricity to something close to 60% in a single generation if we'd turn loose the power of industry and capital, lower some of the artifically-created barriers to expanded use of this resource, and retire as many carbon-emitting coal and oil and NG plants as we can. We have the technology. We know how to do it. We need to put in place a legal and regulatory system that instead of being adversarial and a hindrance is one that is helpful and facilitating for new ventures.
Some theories have oil being made by organic life over hundreds of millions of years (like coal), others say it's only over a few hundred thousand years, still others have it being created with the earth itself.
One of the few things we know for sure is that the quantity of discovered available oil reserves world wide has been increasing faster than its use, which is more than we can say for geothermal sources..
I will answer your question about the 20% solution. This solution leads us to high costs and shortages. Since the timing for the mandates is somewhat in the future, the current czars may not be around when the future bites. The new czars will undoubtedly find a scape goat unless the taxpayers boot them out. The new czars will also preach conservation to make us feel guilty for consuming so much energy.
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