Geothermal Energy Pros And Cons

What is geothermal energy? : Geothermal energy is thermal (heat) energy that is stored, generated and emanated from the Earth’s core to the Earth’s crust.

How is it generated? : The earth core generates geothermal energy through the natural decay of radioactive materials such as Uranium and Potassium. This heat energy is mostly found within magma, which exists below the Earth’s crust. The potential heat energy that exists with the first 100 Kilometers of the Earth’s crust exceeds 500 Kelvin.

How do we generate electricity from it? : The most common way of capturing and transforming geothermal energy into heat is tapping into “hydrothermal convection”. Hydrothermal convection occurs when water seeps down into the earth’s crust, where geothermal

Theoretically speaking, as long as the turbines continue to spin and the earth does not cool down this process can run forever (refer to figure 2).

Cons

Very site specific

Geothermal power plants drill deep into the earth 's crust, the closer the bottom of such tunnels are to the mantle the hotter it gets. In some places the earth 's crust is on 5km thick while in other places the crust is up to 70 km deep. Only very few places have a really thin crust underneath, so scientist take image of the ground beneath and only the best (thinnest crust) areas will be drilled into. Refer to figure 1 to see which parts of the world are able to proficiently use geothermal power plants.

Very expensive

Drilling deep into the earth can be extremely costly. Estimates show that a single geothermal plant usually costs somewhere between 10 million to 50 million.

Water usage

An average geothermal power plant will require over 10000 cubic meters of water (10,000,000 liters), which is enough water to sustain almost a 190 average humans for their entire

In addition to that, geothermal reservoirs naturally replenish themselves, thus excluding any requirement for artificial resources. Geothermal plants themselves have an extremely small footprint on land, as almost all geothermal plants are built partially underground. Furthermore, geothermal energy can be accessed in almost every single corner of the globe, thus meaning basically every country can harness it. The sheer amount of energy that geothermal plants are able to generate yearly is equal to almost every single other major renewable energy source (such as solar energy, with over 11,224 megawatts generated yearly by only 24