High hopes for renewable power from Earth's depths

Los Angeles Times ^ | October 12, 2007 | Elizabeth Douglass, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

[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.

[chimera]

The new czars will also preach conservation to make us feel guilty for consuming so much energy.

All the while riding around in their limos and private jets, no doubt. I see the "usual suspects" are beating the anti-nuclear drums again, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, et al., are out there trashing nukes and preaching about how we "don't need" nukes, we can get by on conservation and wind/solar. Conservation, eh? Well, why don't those scumwads be the ones to start? No more rock concerts or recording projects. Cripes, the energy used to put on one rock concert dwarfs that which will be used by any of us in a lifetime.

[norraad]

Yes, to understand use metaphor==water = the blood system of the earth.

Oil = lymph.

Thomas Gold's books are a great starting point.

It's important to understand as a foundation for undoing all the other lies.

See > Robert Newmans History of Oil on youtube.