Alternate Energy Sources

Details: Written by: Glenn and Rick; Category: Alternate Energy Sources; Hits: 12

The New ‘Gold Rush’ of Geothermal Energy NY Times David Gelles A new wave of start-ups are trying to harvest emissions-free energy from inside the Earth, but the industry still faces significant challenges A surge in next-generation geothermal energy, described as a new "gold rush," is utilizing oil and gas drilling technologies to secure around-the-clock clean power, driven by demand for 24/7 data center energy. Technologies such as Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) and closed-loop systems are bypassing traditional geological constraints to scale this renewable energy source, despite challenges regarding high initial costs and induced seismicity risks. For more than a year, President Trump and his allies have attacked wind and solar power while promoting fossil fuels. Yet there is one type of clean energy that has escaped their wrath: geothermal. Last week, Fervo, a geothermal company based in Houston, made its stock market debut, raising $1.89 billion in its initial public offering. It was the biggest clean tech I.P.O. of all time, giving Fervo a valuation of more than $10 billion. Using techniques borrowed from the oil and gas industry, companies like Fervo drill into the Earth, tapping into natural heat that, when mixed with water, creates steam and powers turbines that make emissions-free electricity. The appeal of geothermal is clear. America is in an energy crunch. Electricity demand is soaring thanks to data centers, industrial activity and electric vehicles. New wind and solar projects are being slowed or canceled, and there is a major backlog of natural gas turbines. And while the Trump administration has taken to extending the life of some coal plants, there’s still an enormous gap between energy supply and demand. The theoretical impact is huge. There is roughly 3,800 megawatts of conventional geothermal capacity in the United States

The International Energy Agency now estimates that geothermal could provide 15 percent of the world’s energy needs by 2050 with sufficient investment. Wood Mackenzie, an energy research firm, asked whether the industry could be “the next North American gold rush.”What’s more, because geothermal can provide what the energy industry calls “always-on base load power,” it is a welcome compliment to intermittent sources of power such as solar and wind. “The potential is very large, and we need new kinds of supply that can balance an increasingly solar-heavy grid,” said. John Coequyt, a director at RMI, an energy consultancy. “It looks like geothermal is sort of the perfect match for that.”

A growing market...... Fervo’s valuation reflects investor enthusiasm for what could be a big new sector of the energy industry.For years, geothermal companies struggled to gain traction and raise money. But that has changed recently, as venture capital firms and corporations have spent billions backing a new generation of start-ups trying to tap into the Earth’s subterranean heat. Other companies, including XGS Energy and Quaise Energy, are also trying to break into the market.“There was such deep skepticism from investors that it was hard not only for Fervo but the entire geothermal ecosystem to actually capitalize the business,” the Fervo chief executive, Tim Latimer, who previously worked in the oil and gas industry, told Ivan Penn and Brad Plumer last week. “I think people are waking up to this opportunity and seeing that we’re going to need all kinds of new technologies to close the gap of how much power we need.” Plus there’s the political support. Even as the Trump administration has moved to cancel offshore wind projects and slow solar development, the Department of Energy recently announced $171 million for geothermal field tests. “The obvious difference here is the connection to the oil and gas industry,” Coequyt said. Another factor is that geothermal can produce sustained power, and adjust its output to meet demand, which addresses a main critique about technologies like wind and solar. “The ability of geothermal to be both base load and load following is consistent with how Republicans have talked about the challenges of renewable energy,” Coequyt said.......read on https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/climate/the-new-gold-rush-of-geothermal-energy.html

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Clean Energy 101: How Rising Demand Is Driving a Grid Tech Revolution Once a stable, slow-moving system, the US grid is running up against its ability to meet demand. An unprecedented set of dynamics is driving a wave of investment: soaring demand growth, rapidly falling prices for clean energy, and outdated rules to update the grid. RMI. Barbara Lantz June 23 2026 Ensuring that supply meets demand is a fundamental concern of every electricity system. If not, blackouts cannot only be inconvenient but also life-threatening. Yet it’s not as simple as adding more power plants to meet new demand. In the United States, as in most other mature energy markets, there are many layers of regional and national regulatory bodies that monitor the power system and ensure it is reliable and financially stable. Within this system, electric utilities create periodic plans to forecast future electricity demand and to plan additional power plants, as well as maintenance and upgrades to the network of wires and devices that deliver that power. Upgrading the grid and incorporating new technologies are important because the grid affects all of us. Household and business electricity bills can be lower, blackouts during extreme weather can be reduced, and new homes, businesses, factories, and data centers can connect to electricity service more quickly.

Demand for electricity is soaring, not stable. Naturally, as more businesses and households electrify — whether with an electric vehicle in the driveway or a new high-efficiency heat pump in the home — and more large electricity users such as data centers connect to the grid, demand for electricity is increasing. After over a decade of flat demand, US electricity demand is climbing, and generation is growing to match. US electricity generation grew 2.8% from 2024 levels to reach 4,430 TWh of electricity in 2025, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). This growth is expected to continue, with the EIA anticipating total electricity consumption to increase an average of 1.7% per year, with commercial and industrial sectors leading the way at 2.6% and 2.1% per year, respectively. Large loads are driving 80% of forecasted US electricity demand. The US Department of Energy has directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to accelerate the interconnection of large loads like data centers, making it vitally important to bring new generation online quickly so the grid can meet expected demand.

Clean energy has a growing cost edge. In most markets, new solar, wind, and battery projects are now cheaper than coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear — making clean energy consistently the lowest-cost option to add electricity supply. Despite political headwinds, utility-scale clean energy is still being deployed across the United States, and even more quickly around the world. With gas turbines on backorder, wild price swings in oil and gas, and steadily falling costs to install solar, wind, and batteries, renewables are out-competing coal, gas, and nuclear as the first choice for new power supplies. In 2025, clean options accounted for most of the new generating capacity added to the US grid. Renewables have outpaced all other options for new additions to the US grid for more than a decade.

However, connecting new resources takes too long. More renewable projects are planned for 2026, yet simply building is not enough. In today’s grid, they must connect to the transmission network to deliver power to users. Yet connecting new supplies to the grid is facing a growing backlog. The US grid has around 1,400 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity. Yet as of mid 2026, more than 2,200 GW of additional capacity, including new generation and storage plants, is stuck in the “interconnection queue,” waiting to be connected to the wider grid.

Modernizing the process by which electricity generation resources can connect to the grid to make it faster, more transparent, and cost-effective can help strengthen energy security and support industrial and technological growth.

What’s a gigawatt? A gigawatt (GW) — equal to 1,000 megawatts, or 1 billion watts — is commonly used to describe very large amounts of power, such as the capacity of major power plants or the electricity demand of entire regions. In the United States, many nuclear reactors can generate about 1 GW of power continuously. A gigawatt-hour (GWh) measures very large quantities of electricity generated or used over time. Utilities, states, and countries often report annual electricity production in gigawatt-hours. One gigawatt-hour is roughly equal to the power that more than 1,000 average US homes use in a month. For more common energy terms, see RMI’s glossary.

How can we avoid grid gridlock? In an era of rapidly rising electricity demand, established practices to expand the grid are moving too slowly to keep up. Planners, utilities, and investors are facing pressure to adapt their planning processes to be faster and more flexible to meet future needs. And increasingly, they’re looking beyond simply adding more power plants and transmission lines. Indeed, to avoid the risk of blackouts — when demand exceeds supply — we don’t need to rely solely on changes in generation and transmission for more reliable electricity. There are also steps electricity users can take to support the grid of the future.......this is just the beginning- a lot more to come https://rmi.org/resources/clean-energy-101-how-rising-demand-is-driving-a-grid-tech-revolution/

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Fossil fuels are the dirtiest and most dangerous energy sources, while nuclear and modern renewable energy sources are vastly safer and cleaner

Summary.......All energy sources have negative effects, but they differ enormously in size: as we will see, fossil fuels are the dirtiest and most dangerous, while nuclear and modern renewable energy sources are vastly safer and cleaner. From the perspectives of both human health and climate change, it matters less whether we transition to nuclear power or renewable energy and more that we stop relying on fossil fuels. Energy has been critical to human progress over the last few centuries. As the United Nations rightly says: “energy is central to nearly every major challenge and opportunity the world faces today.” But while energy brings us massive benefits, it’s not without its downsides. Energy production can have negative impacts on human health and the environment in three ways.

The first is air pollution .......millions of people die prematurely every year as a result of air pollution. Fossil fuels and the burning of biomass — wood, dung, and charcoal — are responsible for most of those deaths. The second is accidents.......This includes accidents in the mining and extraction of fuels — coal, uranium, rare metals, oil, and gas. It also includes accidents in transporting raw materials and infrastructure, the construction of the power plant, or its maintenance. The third is greenhouse gas emissions......fossil fuels are the main source of greenhouse gases, the primary driver of climate change. In 2020, 91% of global CO2 emissions came from fossil fuels and industry.1

No energy source is completely safe. All have short-term impacts on human health, either through air pollution or accidents, and they all have long-term impacts by contributing to climate change. But, their contribution to each differs enormously. Fossil fuels are both the dirtiest and most dangerous in the short term and emit the most greenhouse gases per unit of energy. This means that there are thankfully no trade-offs here: low-carbon energy sources are also the safest. From the perspective of both human health and climate change, it matters less whether we transition to nuclear power or renewable energy and more that we stop relying on fossil fuels.

Nuclear and renewables are far, far safer than fossil fuels.....Before we consider the long-term impacts of climate change, let’s look at how each source stacks up in terms of short-term health risks.To make these comparisons fair, we can’t just look at the total deaths from each source: fossil fuels still dominate our global electricity mix, so we would expect that they would kill more people. Instead, we compare them based on the estimated number of deaths they cause per unit of electricity. This is measured in terawatt-hours. One terawatt-hour is about the same as the annual electricity consumption of 150,000 citizens in the European Union. This includes deaths from air pollution and accidents in the supply chain.

Let’s look at this comparison in the chart. Fossil fuels and biomass kill many more people than nuclear and modern renewables per unit of electricity. Coal is, by far, the dirtiest. Even then, these estimates for fossil fuels are likely to be very conservative. They are based on power plants in Europe, which have good pollution controls and are based on older models of the health impacts of air pollution. As I discuss in more detail at the end of this article, global death rates from fossil fuels based on the most recent research on air pollution are likely to be even higher.

Our perceptions of the safety of nuclear energy are strongly influenced by two accidents: Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 and Fukushima in Japan in 2011. These were tragic events. However, compared to the millions that die from fossil fuels every year, the final death tolls were very low. To calculate the death rates used here, I assume a death toll of 433 from Chernobyl, and 2,314 from Fukushima.4 If you are interested, I look at how many died in each accident in detail in a related article.

The other source heavily influenced by a few large-scale accidents is hydropower. Its death rate since 1965 is 1.3 deaths per TWh. This rate is almost completely dominated by one event: the Banqiao Dam Failure in China in 1975, which killed approximately 171,000 people. Otherwise, hydropower was very safe, with a death rate of just 0.04 deaths per TWh — comparable to nuclear, solar, and wind.

Finally, we have solar and wind. The death rates from both of these sources are low but not zero. A small number of people die in accidents in supply chains — ranging from helicopter collisions with turbines, fires during the installation of turbines or panels, and drownings on offshore wind sites.

People often focus on the marginal differences at the bottom of the chart — between nuclear, solar, and wind. This comparison is misguided: the uncertainties around these values mean they are likely to overlap. The key insight is that they are all much, much safer than fossil fuels. Nuclear energy, for example, results in 99.9% fewer deaths than brown coal; 99.8% fewer than coal; 99.7% fewer than oil; and 97.6% fewer than gas. Wind and solar are just as safe.

Putting death rates from energy in perspective......Looking at deaths per terawatt-hour can seem abstract. Let’s try to put it in perspective........read on https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Details: Written by: Glenn and Rick; Category: Alternate Energy Sources; Hits: 102

Carbon-Free Energy......Next-Generation Geothermal Energy WRI Katrina McLaughlin May 6, 2026 As Geothermal Heats Up in US States, Key Policy Levers Can Advance Its Next Generation. Next-generation geothermal could expand clean energy in the U.S. Here’s how states are using procurement, permitting reforms and incentives to help scale the technology.Geothermal energy is a long-standing part of the U.S. power system. But it remains limited, supplying less than 1% of the country’s electricity.That’s now on the cusp of changing. A new generation of geothermal technologies can tap Earth’s heat energy in places without conventional geothermal, producing consistently available clean electricity and heat across the country. Next-generation geothermal has already seen significant cost declines and well drilling improvements in the past five years, with projects beginning to come online and major deals signed with utilities and large clean energy buyers. Between 2021 and 2025, National Laboratory of the Rockies data shows that 1.6 gigawatt (GW) of new geothermal power purchase agreements were signed, 60% of which (almost 1 GW) were for next-generation geothermal projects.

Federal policy is a key lever for advancing these technologies. Recent federal actions include expedited permitting at the Department of Interior and ensuring continued geothermal eligibility in the technology-neutral clean electricity tax credits preserved through 2033. State-level action has received less attention to date, yet states can be important drivers of geothermal through demand-side levers, environmental regulations and permitting, incentives and other measures. In fact, the resurgence in geothermal activity — and many of the developers and projects making headlines in recent years — have benefited from state policy.

Here are some of the key policy and regulatory levers that states can leverage to help enable next-generation geothermal. Demand-Side Levers.....States have significant authority to set generation mix targets and procurement requirements for utilities in their jurisdiction. These include state clean electricity standards (CES) and renewable portfolio standards (RPS) which require utilities to procure certain amounts of clean electricity based on emissions factors. Although not part of a legislatively enacted RPS or CES, perhaps the most important state action for next-generation geothermal development and commercialization has been procurement orders from the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC). The first — the 2021 Mid-Term Reliability Analysis — was released in 2021 following a summer of brownouts in 2020. It called for load-serving entities to procure at least 1 GW of clean, firm resources (defined as a capacity factor of at least 80%) and 1 GW of long-duration storage (defined as providing eight hours of storage or more) between 2023 and 2026. The impact of this order on next-generation geothermal is substantial; for example, the major offtaker at Fervo’s Cape Station is Southern California Edison. In February 2026, the CPUC issued another procurement order, this time calling for 1.5 GW of additional clean, firm resources between 2029 and 2032.

Separate from these CPUC procurement orders for utilities, the California legislature has also authorized centralized state procurement of geothermal. AB 1373 was enacted in 2023 to centralize state procurement of critical clean, firm power resources, including up to 1 GW of geothermal by 2035. This is a notable development, as this centralized state procurement is what was used during California’s early 2000s energy crisis. The use of centralized procurement tools speaks to the importance of clean, firm resources like geothermal to long-term grid planning and reliability. Some states and utilities are introducing tariffs to help bring next-generation geothermal and other long lead-time resources online while protecting ratepayers. A significant example is Nevada and the utility NV Energy, where the Nevada Public Utilities Commission approved a clean transition tariff in May 2025. This rate design allows a developer and large energy buyer to enter into an agreement in which the large energy buyer agrees to pay a price premium for a resource. This arrangement can play a critical role in securing clean, firm resources while protecting general ratepayers from cost increases. The clean transition tariff was first developed for use in Nevada between Fervo and Google, and in 2026 the conventional geothermal company Ormat announced it would also seek to use the clean transition tariff in a deal with Google. These recent actions suggest that state procurement orders and utility planning will remain a significant demand pull for geothermal energy. Critically, recent examples show that next-generation geothermal projects have seen dramatically falling costs and quicker development timelines, and can be viable options for procurement timeframes.

Environmental Regulations and Permitting.......States can also modernize environmental regulations and permitting requirements. State regulatory regimes for geothermal may be nonexistent or decades old, and reflective of conventional geothermal for electricity production, rather than new technologies that use advanced drilling techniques. Critical issues at the state level include resource definitions, permitting and leasing, and underground injection control requirements......read on https://www.wri.org/technical-perspectives/next-generation-geothermal-policy-regulation

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Even the Guardian's Monbiot has converted to Nuclear..... Before coal became widely available, wood was used not just for heating homes but also for industrial processes: if half the land surface of Britain had been covered with woodland, Wrigley shows, we could have made 1.25m tonnes of bar iron a year (a fraction of current consumption) and nothing else. Even with a much lower population than today's, manufactured goods in the land-based economy were the preserve of the elite. Deep green energy production – decentralised, based on the products of the land – is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown. But the energy source to which most economies will revert if they shut down their nuclear plants is not wood, water, wind or sun, but fossil fuel. On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power.

Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast. Yes, I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry. Yes, I would prefer to see the entire sector shut down, if there were harmless alternatives. But there are no ideal solutions. Every energy technology carries a cost; so does the absence of energy technologies. Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.rejection of nuclear energy can be ignorant bordering on superstitious, but safety concerns demand more space and consideration......read on https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima

Geothermal would provide15 percent of the world’s energy needs by 2050

Clean Energy 101: How Rising Demand Is Driving a Grid Tech Revolution

From Fossil Fuels are the Dirtiest and most Dangerous energy Sources to Nuclear and Modern Renewable Energy which are vastly Safer and Cleaner

Key Policy and Reguatory levers that States can Leverage to help enable Next-generation Geothermal.

Even the Guardian's Monbiot has converted to Nuclear

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