Comments for What Will it Take for Geothermal to be Cheaper than Coal at http://www.ecogeek.org , comment 1 to 25 out of 20 comments http://www.ecogeek.org Thu, 20 Jun 2013 02:35:26 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-34348 Did they factor in the environmental and health costs of coal? That would probably bridge the gap even further. - geothermal pipe Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:35:14 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-31063 Check out my squidoo page on geothermal technology. Because of tax credits and energy savings it is really becoming more popular and affordable. http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/new_workshop/GeothermalTechnology - Michele Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:36:53 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28929 I have read somewhere thatformer president Bush uses geothermal to heat and cool this Crawford Texas home. Does anyone know what is involved with that technology?8) - Richard Fletcher Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:18:51 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28821 Russ - "Slinkies" are for very small yards. They aren't the installation of choice. The idea is to get ~500' of pipe in contact with soil and if one doesn't have a lot of area then what one has gets opened up and coils of plastic pipe is dropped in. Slinkies, while the get a lot of pipe in the ground for pipe/soil contact, reduce the volume of soil being utilized as coils lay closely together, overlapping. I suspect that even small yards could be better "heat mined" by installing multiple runs in the same trench, but at different depths. A tool that opened a narrow trench and simultaneously installed multiple runs of plastic pipe wouldn't do much damage. (BTW, I mis-remembered depth. Normal installation of heat exchange fields is in the 3' to 6' range (1-2 meters.) - Bob Wallace Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:45:47 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28778 Yeah. I'm quite familiar with how they work, having, as I said above, priced out bids for my home and an office building. As I noted above, if you are going to do shallow horizontal tubing arrays, in order to get adequate surface area contact etc, you need to do a large spiral array (like a giant "Slinky" toy). You need hundreds of feet... not a few feet. They are big and wide... = big deal= expensive. And that type is not as effective as a set of deep vertical tubing arrays (deep=expensive). There's no "magic solution" for the digging, I'm afraid. And that's if there's never any mechanical problems. Here in SC at least you are much better off with like a 14+ seer air source HP and some solar pannels IMO. - bbm Thu, 23 Jul 2009 22:40:54 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28765 I wrote 20'-30' as in feet. The idea is to get water down to where the ground stays more or less in the mid-50s F and lots of places that is no more than a few feet. Heat pumps pump heat from a warmer site to a cooler site. It's more efficient to pump in heat from 50 degree soil than from 20 degree air. The need is to get ample amounts of pipe/surface area down below where season temperature swings would lessen the effectiveness. Installing several feet of plastic pipe, each in their own very narrow trench with maximum distance between each 'run' would create a good heat exchange opportunity. Ir might even make sense to install multiple lines per trench, each separated by a few feet (that's feet ;o) by soil. Since I'm inventing on the fly, in an area with dense clay soil it might make sense to backfill with sand or some other more permeable substance which would allow in more water and assist heat transfer. Done correctly/carefully one would end up with a series of narrow parallel disturbed 'rows' in their yard which would need to be sodded or reseeded. But not with a "torn up yard". I think we're just early in the game. Obviously panels might make more sense in some situations, say the deep South. Not so much in upper New York or Vermont. As for seismic activity and fracking, yes, we've been there, seen that. The dry rock geothermal site at Basil Switzerland might have triggered a small tremor when it fracked. The movement occurred eight days (IIRC) after the fracking liquids were introduced, not during drilling. This was in an area of high tectonic stress so it's not really clear that the test site triggered the shake or whether it would have happened on that day anyway. That old problem of not being able to determine a slope with only one data point. We can study the problem as it has been observed for a hundred years or so in the petroleum industry and proceed carefully rather than sticking our initial test sites in the middle of San Francisco. My reference to mything is that this myth (or hyper concern) is already out there. We've got one site with a minor tremor which it may or may not have caused. We've got other sites in which no tremors were observed. But some people are pushing the belief that geothermal will destroy the Earth. (Not to mention people saying that we're going to pierce into the magma and create volcanoes....) - Bob Wallace Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:29:32 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28748 BOB: Actually I wrote about the $25k quote for the GSHP. You have to dig deeper than 20-30 inches to get meaningful temperature changes and have enough of a reservoir to get benefit. You can either dig vertical wells (IIRC it was two wells for tubing per ton of AC about 150 ft deep each) or a large spiral form tubing array (less deep but tears up more yard). That's for a closed system. You can do an open system for less money, but it runs through a lot of ground water (like 10 gal/min IIRC). I still think you do a lot better with solar pannels to power your AC. I mentioned the crust stability issue in regards to geothermal because of the fact that a hydrofracking type process has been touted as a great/cheap/easy new way to exploit untapped geothermal resources, not because there's any "mything" going on. - bbm Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:35:51 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28738 Say Monica, Harvard has a brand new study out, all about the cost of carbon sequestering in new coal/electricity plants. [i] Harvard University researchers have issued a new report that confirms what many experts already feared: Stopping greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants is going to cost a lot of money. Electricity costs could double at a first-generation plant that captures and stores carbon dioxide emissions, according to the report from energy researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center. Costs would drop as the technology matures, but could still amount to an increase of 22 to 55 percent, according to the report, "Realistic Costs of Carbon Capture," issued this week [/i] Your bosses give you any talking points on this yet? http://wvgazette.com/News/200907210389?page=1&build=cache - Bob Wallace Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:44:53 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28732 Russ - The $25k price of ground assist heat pumps doesn't make sense to me. (And you're not the only person to report very high costs.) I'm guessing that the installation technology has not adequately developed to allow for economical and minimally damaged installation. Right now we have "micro trenching" for installing optic fiber along highways. It digs a half inch wide slot through pavement. Why aren't we seeing a small trencher, something like a Bobcat, that can dig down 20'-30' but only an inch or two wide and lay pipe as it goes? Around here one can get backhoe work done for under $100 per hour. Unless there is significant rock to be sliced it would seem to be a short day job to cut and fill a few trenches. Premium prices for early adapters? - Bob Wallace Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:32:22 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28731 bbm - We've got something like 600,000 oil wells drilled into the ground in the US. We've known for 80-100 years that sometimes drilling triggers a small quake if there's sufficient pressure in the area. (I.e., it's about ready, in geological time, to move anyway.) As far as I know none of the quakes have been of any consequence. They're the sort of shakers that we have multiple times per week here in California. They, for the most part, are detected only by sensitive instruments. The triggering seems to be related to the fracking process. Liquids are lubricants. If you've got a lot of dry rock under pressure, holding together because of friction, and you lube them, well.... It's hard to see how we would ever want to drill even a small fraction of the number of holes that we've drilled for fossil fuels. But for those that we do drill, it might be "best practice" to avoid "active faults", those know to be under high pressure and to not drill close to densely populated areas. Hope we don't have to deal with a lot of "mythers" like has happened with wind farms and birds... - Bob Wallace Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:26:26 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28730 At least not as low as you might expect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint#Carbon_footprint_for_various_types_of_electricity_production Additionally, there are concerns about effecting crust stability if employed in a large enough fashion not unlike the concerns with hydro-fracturing for gas. - bbm Wed, 22 Jul 2009 13:24:55 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28729 Pricetag: $25 grand. That with digging up your entire yard. And any maintainence problems will be VERY costly. For our office it was going to be about $250 grand (about $150 grand more than an air source system). Apparently they are much better (as far as advantages in efficiency etc) for heating in the winter than airconditioning. I suspect that it would be a LOT cheaper to just put up a solar array to power high efficiency air source air conditioning. And to up insulate the attic with some blow in cellulose and maybe a radiant barrier. They may be more reasonable in the north for heating, however. - bbm Wed, 22 Jul 2009 13:16:28 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28715 Again - off the main topic - Ground Source Heat Pumps (GSHP) are great except for one thing - cost. You get a small improvement over Air Source (ASHP) with no payback in sight when compared to ASHP - even considering increasing electric costs. The units themselves are newer so less competition and the extra cost of the ground connection make the system unattractive. No government funds are really needed for research. The things have been around for something like 50 years. - russ Wed, 22 Jul 2009 01:46:58 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28708 OK, I'm willing to let clean coal die. ;) But how about we don't muddy the field by using "geothermal" when talking about ground assisted heat pumps? I think it would be better to use geothermal to refer to the process of using deep Earth temperature to produce electricity. But as long as you've steered us off topic to ground effect heat pumps, you acquainted with the subdivision somewhere in Canada that has installed solar heating systems on their garages, pumps the heat underground during the summer, and then uses it to heat occupied areas during the winter? Danged clever, I thought... - Bob Wallace Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:14:44 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28706 Let's not get distracted with so-called clean coal when we are talking about geothermal! People are drawing 60 degree water out of deep wells in Vermont to heat with, and 45 degree water out of shallower wells to cool with, it only becomes a matter of drilling, a heat pump and circulating water to heat energy-efficient buildings. If we put the 60 million dollars the fossil fuel lobbies have paid Congress over the past 10 years, into geothermal subsidies I think we would have it licked! - OakleighVermont Solargroupies Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:45:56 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28700 Monica, we support clean coal technology. We've spent huge amounts of taxpayer money trying to find a way to economically sequester carbon from coal burning. We have found no way to remove the carbon for a reasonable price. But we'll continue to spend some research money on what looks like it will be a rat hole. In the meantime, it's time to quit using coal. In the last two years we've discovered that we have vastly more natural gas than we realized. We can economically convert existing coal burning plants to natural gas plants. Lots of benefits follow: 1) Greatly less CO2 per unit energy produced. 2) End of mercury and other coal related pollutants pumped into our air, water and land. 3) End of "where can we pile up the ash?" problems. 4) And, very important to many of us, we no longer have to destroy our mountains and streams via mountain top removal. Perhaps a 5, would free up a lot of railway for better passenger and freight hauling. Now, isn't that a win-win both for electric producers and everyone else? - Bob Wallace Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:38:55 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28698 It’s time to support clean coal technology here in the States, so we can export it to developing countries like China. Once the Duke Energy’s Edwardsport IGCC plant in Indiana is completed (it’s on schedule for 2012), this IGCC plant will be one of the cleanest coal-based power plants in the world, producing 10 times as much power as the existing unit with 45 percent less carbon dioxide emissions per unit of energy produced. http://sn.im/factuality5 - Monica from ACCCE Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:24:29 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28696 Thank you so, so, so, SO much for all your time and effort to report all this MUCH NEEDED, *POSITIVE* news! You are so vital, please keep up what you are doing. If you are needing money feel free to ask for donations, I would help! Your positive hopeful attitude towards the future is our only hope for survival. Much love and respect, Zachary Stowasser ps. tried to submit this via contact but nothing happened when I clicked it. tried with firefox and safari on my mac. also the email address doesn't work with a "+" sign, I use that with gmail to filter messages... - Zachary Stowasser Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:21:40 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28693 The $3B is about the same as what is pledged for government research in carbon capture on coal plants. Hmmm, is the $3B required because it matches CCS? Either way, it seems enhanced geothermal deserves a significant share of the R&D money. - Carl Hage Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:58:24 +0100 http://www.ecogeek.org/geothermal-power/2865-what-will-it-take-for-geothermal-to-be-cheaper-tha#comment-28682 it'll take a lot of hard work and thinking! - Fred Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:35:58 +0100