By Jennifer McDermott – The Associated Press
A method of clean electricity production to address the climate emergency has been quietly advancing and reached a milestone on Tuesday.
A California utility is backing the largest geothermal energy project in the United States: 400 megawatts of clean electricity from the Earth’s heat, enough to power about 400,000 homes.
Southern California Edison will purchase the electricity from Fervo Energy, a Houston-based geothermal company, Fervo announced.
Associated Press
The company is drilling up to 125 wells in southwestern Utah.
This type of clean electricity reduces the need for traditional power plants, which are causing the climate emergency. According to Wilson Ricks, an energy systems researcher at Princeton University, this boost could go a long way toward lowering the cost of new geothermal power generation.
[Una arquitecta habla sobre el impacto positivo de las construcciones sostenibles]
“If these purchases contribute to the takeoff of this technology, its impact on the elimination of coal use worldwide “It could be huge,” he said. ‘Decarbonization’ consists of replacing the elements that produce carbon dioxide and methane, causing the climate emergency, with machines and methods that do not produce them.
Today, the world still relies heavily on fossil fuels for round-the-clock power. This new agreement demonstrates that clean energy can meet growing electricity demand, said Sarah Jewett, Fervo’s vice president of strategy.
“I think that’s why it’s so exciting. It’s not a specific energy resource for a specific use,” he said. “That’s something we haven’t had readily available” and could scale up.
[La emergencia climática incrementa la intensidad de las olas de calor]
The first generation of geothermal power plants, for example The Geysers in California, took advantage of very hot deposits of steam or water near the Earth’s surface. These deposits are relatively rare..
Geothermal startups are adapting drilling technologies and practices borrowed from the oil and gas industry to create reservoirs from hot rock. This opens up the potential for geothermal energy in many more places. Engineers have been working on these methods for years.
The United States is one of the world leaders in using the Earth’s heat to produce electricity, but geothermal still accounts for less than half of the country’s total large-scale electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
[Planeta Tierra: Toman medidas para contener la contaminación en un importante lago de El Salvador]
Fervo is a pioneer in the horizontal drilling of geothermal deposits. It signed the world’s first corporate deal with Google in 2021 to develop new geothermal energy and drilled three wells in Nevada. That project began sending carbon-free electricity to Nevada’s grid in November to power data centers there.
The Cape Station project, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) south of Salt Lake City, is expected to begin supplying electricity to California in 2026.
David Hochschild, chairman of the California Energy Commission, said the state is committed to clean, carbon-free electricity. According to Hochschild, geothermal complements wind and solar farms, and provides constant energy when there is no wind or sun, which is key to ensuring reliability as the state reduces fossil fuels.
