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An extensive U.S. Geothermal Energy Market Report has been prepared and published by Glitner to back up their investment decision.

Mighty River Power will spend $450 million building a geothermal power station at Rotokawa, 10 kilometres north of Taupo.
The state-owned electricity generator and retailer told Parliament's commerce select committee yesterday that the station would generate 132 megawatts of electricity, enough for a city the size of Tauranga.
Company chairwoman Carole Durbin said Nga Awa Purua would be the second biggest geothermal power station in New Zealand.

Mighty River was granted resource consent for the station in December, and procurement contracts are due to be completed this month. The station will be built near the existing, much smaller, 37MW plant and will connect to the 220-kilovolt transmission lines that run directly over the field.
Nga Awa Purua is a joint venture with the Tauhara North No2 Trust, and will take about 2½ years to build.
Mighty River chief executive Doug Heffernan said Nga Awa Purua was first talked about 20 years ago. "It didn't happen at that time because the country had so much cheap Maui gas and it was too expensive to develop the field."

Mighty River will also commission its $300 million 90MW geothermal station at Kawerau this year.
Mr Heffernan said geothermal generation would make up nearly half of all generation by 2015, compared with about 5 per cent two years ago. Hydro generation would make up the other half, down from about 80 per cent two years ago.
Mr Heffernan told the committee that rain at the weekend had filled the hydro lakes enough to provide an extra month of storage, easing the pressure on winter power supply.

Yesterday Environment Minister Trevor Mallard appointed Judge Gordon Whiting to chair a board of inquiry to consider Contact Energy's proposal for a 220MW geothermal power station at Te Mihi near Taupo.
The board will consider submissions on Contact's resource consent application for the $500 million plant, hold a public meeting and make a final decision on the proposal.
The company plans to have the geothermal plant producing electricity by 2011. Contact will lobby for the same fast-track process for a second geothermal plant in the Tauhara steamfield.
The two would cost Contact about $1 billion to develop in the next five years.

essex wrote:Wind turbines have their place but not at any cost.

Geothermal power plants are an almost pollution free source of electricity. Typically they are installed near shallow subsurface sources of steam and/or hot water characterized by faults, seismic activity, earthquakes and volcanoes.

The source of geothermal power generation is steam at a temperature of ~300 degree C. To access geothermal steam involves drilling a vertical well to the source. A second well is drilled to the lower water level of the steam source. The steam is directed into a steam turbine which in turn generates electricity. The condensed turbine exhaust is re-injected back into the underground reservoir.

There are essentially three types of geothermal power plants used depending on the source.
On dry land and free of volcanic activity, the temperature is typically 41 degrees C higher for every 1.6 km below the surface. With a well drilled to a depth of 3 to 10 kms, steam can be successfully produced from water upon contact with subsurface rock. Steam produced in this manner is known as an Enhanced Geothermal System [EGS] and sometimes referred to as a Hot Dry Rock [HDR] system.

A 2006 MIT report suggests that there is enough hard {hot} rock at a 10 km depth in the United States subsurface, to supply the entire world's energy requirements for 30,000 years.
To produce a sustainable source of steam, the HDR system requires sufficient heat at a subsurface depth, a hard rock layer capable of being fractured, an insulating layer above it and a source of water.

Armageddon wrote:So we are all going to be driving $100,000 hydrogen cars ?

Armageddon wrote:So we are all going to be driving $100,000 hydrogen cars ?

Armageddon wrote:So we are all going to be driving $100,000 hydrogen cars ?