Geothermal energy, as I’ve written in a 2021 post excerpt below, may be the perfect renewable, as it is fully dispatchable and uses proven technologies.
This post will start in my deep past, over 40 years ago and travel several decades into the future. The subject of this post is Geothermal Power, a renewable energy source that was first used to generate electricity in Larderello, Italy, in 1904, and thus is one of the oldest renewable energy sources. It has been used in my home state (California) to generate a significant amount of our electric energy since the early 1960s.
Geothermal power has a strong technology base in the petroleum industry. Drilling holes in the ground to extract geothermal steam uses the same tech as drilling holes to extract oil & natural gas. The bad news is that it’s damned expensive, and depending on the specifics of a given (petroleum or geothermal) project may not be justified based on the return on investment. Also, geothermal production requires two wells – one to extract the steam and another to reinject the condensate.
