Etherblue Blog Geothermal Energy's Trouble in Competing with Solar

Category:GeothermalA geothermal power plant generates and delivers electricity during the day and night to constantly help California meet the state's mandated renewable energy related utilities. Both the utilities as well as the state regulators are indirectly putting much more premium on solar energy during the evaluation and approval of agreements related to the purchase of power. The production of solar electricity typically fluctuates, and as a result makes it difficult to balance between supply and demand in an electric grid. This doesn't help in any way as a geothermal power plant usually requires huge amount of upfront cost to develop. All this takes a long time to plan and build.The development of geothermal energy has been taking place in California for many decades, even before the state actually started to acquire the basic utilities so as to increase the amount of renewable electricity to sell to the customers. The amount of renewable energy sold by 2010 is 20% and is projected to be around 33% by 2020.A geothermal project generally requires huge investment, i.e. millions of dollars, for just drilling exploratory wells. This is performed to check if the available site contains sufficient hot steam and water to generate the required electricity. This analysis is done to decide whether the plant needs to be built on a smaller or larger scale to control the investments and keep the energy production costs down. The developers based out of California usually size their projects up to 49.9 megawatts to avoid the unnecessary licensing processes that are implemented by the California Energy Commission and are changed from time to time. Such projects also take more time to plan, build as well as to start production when compared to that of solar panels.Tags:geothermal energygeothermal plantalternative energyearthhot steam