aquaculture

Why Investors Worship Old King Coal

Dear Mr. Ward.

Induced seismicity by human activity is a phenomenon in all engineering projects such as coal mining, drilling for natural gas and oil, tunnel construction, reservoirs of large hydropower dams etc.

Actually coal mining caused the largest such incident in Australia.
news.nationalgeographi...

The management of the Basel project made the mistake of not clearly communicating that such a mild tremor would occur.

The greatest risk of tremors is generally understood to be the attempted underground storage of large amounts of CO2 from coal-fired powerplants.

Of course tremors are only a problem in seismic active areas and geothermal powerplants need not be built there at all.

However, there is a good amount of scientific evidence that geothermal energy projects of this kind, actually reduce the risk of tremors in such areas by releasing tectonic pressure, wich makes sense to me.

The German government was 'not amused' by the Swiss miscommunication and it is my understanding from Berlin that all 70- 80 EGS geothermal projects will go ahead as planned as "geothermal energy offers enormous potential for the future of germany's energy mix".

The U.S. has much better geothermal resources than Europe.

For political reasons i will not comment on the French project.

Why Investors Worship Old King Coal

Interesting article.
The coal lobby in Washington considers solar and (to a lesser degree) wind energy to be insignificant and do not mind DOE support for these areas. However, the White House, through its budget office, did force the DOE to cut all R&D funding on geothermal energy, effectively to $0 in 2007.
This is because many studies show that a little R&D investment in geothermal powerplants (now generally at 7-9 $ cents/kwh) offer the opportunity of clean abundant electricity through the grid at costs of 4-5 $ cents/kwh.

The U.S. geothermal industry experiences "dramatic growth surge" with expectations that total power production (currently 3 million U.S. homes) could triple over the next few years.
GEA together with Ormat technologies (NYSE:ORA) and Glitnir Bank will host a workshop on july 23 in NYC to introduce geothermal energy to the NYC financial community.
Among the present: Google
Google announced that geothermal energy will be one of their focus areas for new investment.
More info: geo-energy.org

On this website there are articles on how you can profit from the coming boom in geothermal.