There are so many sources of renewable energy in the world, that maybe someday we will do an article to show you all of them. However, the problem lies in choosing and developing the most powerful and efficient of them all, something that Iceland did and created a very powerful monopoly that America has just taken away. This is the project with which we are going to drill the Earth and extract what the whole planet is looking for, with an unprecedented power and an exceptionally high temperature.
The whole world is looking for this energy: America has one of the biggest reservoirs
The LPO of the United States’ Department of Energy has been critical in the support of geothermal energy development projects across the country. The latter has received LPO investments aimed at the development of America’s geothermal assets, as outlined below. There are the Geysers Geothermal Complex located in California, which was extended a $350 million LPO loan guarantee.
It’s the largest geothermal power complex in the world; it has an installed capacity of 725 MW, or over 725,000 homes. Doing so, it is possible to give an example of the Stillwater Geothermal Project in Nevada that was granted the LPO loan guarantee worth $98.5M. This project has a total installed capacity of 33 MW, which puts it among those that are considered large geothermal power plants.
Some keys to understand the size of the project: How innovative and massive it could be
Based on new information, the current geothermal capacity of the United States stands at 3,700 MW and thus ranks as the second-largest producer after the Philippines in the manufacture of geothermal power production. Although this capacity is spread across the states, California, Nevada, and Utah are the most advanced in this area.
While the contribution of geothermal energy is quite small at present, more than 16,000 GWh of electricity was produced by geothermal power plants in 2023 in the United States, and it makes up less than 0.4% of the total electricity generated in the country. Although this may look insignificant, the possibilities for the development of geothermal energy are massive.
It is important to understand that specialists currently think that the geothermal field in the United States has a promising future. In the United States of America alone, the Department of Energy has contemplated to scale up the country’s geothermal capacity from the present figured at 3.7 GW to 60 GW by the year 2050.
It’s not only about 60 GW: We could sell this energy to the rest of the world (like Dubai does)
In order to do this, the government and the private sector are spending resources to enhance geothermal technologies, thus making them cheaper. This comprises researching new technologies like EGS, which can be used to access deeper and much hotter geothermal resources.
Also, the Biden administration has named geothermal as one of the focal areas of the US’s clean energy actions, promising to support it with tax credits and other meaningful stimuli for the advancement of the geothermal industry advancement. Thus, further development with the utilization of these approaches can make geothermal energy a popular source in the United States in the future.
The opportunities that geothermal energy in America has gone far beyond supplying our electric grid. It is about diversifying to avoid depending exclusively on fossil fuels or, in the worst case, on the dreaded black hydrogen that some countries are developing and that is becoming an even bigger problem than the one we already have (although others are camouflaging it as gray in a change of color that nobody believes).
