The advantages of Geothermal Energy

Geothermal can be invested to lower the risk of solar and wind. Its installation is way behind and there is loads of room for growth. It is the heat generated from the radioactive substances, which can diffuse inside or escape through the crust.

It is most commonly available at the places where the tectonic plates meet like Iceland. Such areas are prone to earthquakes and the crust at these locations is thinnest.

Onshore geothermal fields are inaccessible and difficult to develop as compared to offshore, which can be less expensive.

It can originate from the residual heat produced during the formation of crust or continuously breaking of the crust, and it can be extracted by pumping cold water and retrieving hot water.

It is easy to extract heat in such places to generate power for everyday use. The countries -Philippines, Costa Rica, and New Zealand are located in similar places.

The temperature produced in such a way is distributed to the earth’s outer layers and such heat coming from the bags of magma can come from the deeper areas of the planet, towards the areas of lower pressure.

How the power is generated?

The projects can be dry steam, binary or flash. Dry steam uses steam, flash uses high-pressure hot water mixed with cool flash and the binary use hot water with a secondary liquid to generate steam.

Binary-based projects can be found in over 20 countries. Turkey has several such installations which helped it to increase the capacity of 21 per cent to 1.3GW of the global total 13.3 GW. Calgary-based Razor Energy Corp, recently, announced to fund such projects.

Indonesia and Turkey are leaders in such installations and account for over 60 percent of the new deployments. Other countries having such widely active installations include Iceland, the US, Croatia, Indonesia and New Zealand and Kenya.

Global investment in the sector amounts to an estimated $2.2 billion where most of the existing plants are based on dry steam or flash technologies. Binary is one of the fastest-growing due to the growth in low-temperature resources.

In Turkey, the country improved production using renewables to 62% where it produced 74.35kWH in the first quarter. The biggest share of green energy up to 30.41 per cent is provided by hydroelectric power, which accounts for 16.22 per cent and wind produces 8.33 per cent.

Advantages and drawbacks of geothermal Energy

It provides a consistent and expanding source of energy. As per the IRENA report - it has grown from 10GW in 2010 to 13.3 GW in 2018. It provides clean electricity, which does not emit harmful gases to induce climate change and saves a lot on heating and cooling.

The heat produced through such sources is free of cost and inexhaustible but it requires deployment and maintenance costs.

Some plants result in mini tremors in the area where it is deployed, although, this is location specific drawback of such projects. It is also related to the emission of sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide which are considered environmentally harmful.