Alternative Energy Presentation

Hi. My name is Eric Coleman.

And welcome to my alternative energy presentation.

I choose geothermal energy, the future that's already here.

I promise I will make sense later on.

So what is geothermal energy?

Well, it's heat energy that is generated from deep within

the earth.

Okay. And the most common type of geothermal energy is

the one that you would find at your home, Um,

where some kind of cold substance, whether it be cold

air, cold water, it could be anything.

We'll use water just toe.

Make it easier to understand, say cold water comes from

your house, goes deep underground to where it's warm, and

and that cold water absorbs the heat from the surrounding

soil and becomes hot.

And then that gets pumped back into your home.

And now you have hot water that, at its base

form, is what you thermal energy.

It's really all about.

So it's a very promising alternative, and one that's already

being used around the world.

Now, if you look at this chart, you might be

surprised to think Well, Wow, the U.

S. Is actually the top geothermal using country in the

world. So why am I making this presentation.

Well, well, we'll get to that in a little bit.

Um, so Iceland actually boasts the largest renewable resource powered

energy consumption.

And this is a little chart I made is beautiful.

And it comes.

The data comes directly from the government of Iceland.

65% of their total energy consumption comes from geothermal energy.

Um, 20% comes from hydro power, and then you will

see that actually, 15% comes from fossil fuels and we'll

talk about this more later on.

But the reason that there is still 15% fossil fuels

is mostly from transportation.

Because you cannot power cars with geothermal energy.

That's just maybe you could power like an electric car

by charging it through a turbine that's being turned from

geothermal steam.

But we'll get into that lead.

Eso How does it worked?

Well, there's three main types of ways.

Um, there's three main times of geothermal stations, and the

most common that I told you before it was ground

source heat pumps where remember, just a few feet below

the surface, the earth maintains a near constant temperature.

It doesn't fluctuate like it does above ground.

So this is an example of what a heat pipe

ah heat pump might look like inside your house and

that heat pump it will.

Well, there's two different modes.

We'll talk about heating first.

It'll take cold, will say water again, but it could

also be gold air.

It'll take cold water, and it will pump it down

down into the earth, where it's warmer that it'll absorb.

That heat will become warm, and then it will come

back into the heat exchange of the pump, and you

can use the hot water.

You can also cool your house because heat pump, just

like in a sea.

It'll take the the heat from the air in your

house, and it'll transfer that heat into cold water.

It'll make it hot, and then that hot water will

be pumped down to the earth.

Now you might think like what?

Is it just going to get hotter now?

The heat is already more hot than the soil, so

instead of getting mawr warm from the soil, that heat

from the water actually disperses into it discharges into the

soil. So now that water is cool and it'll come

back into your back into the heat pump.

It'll absorb more heat from you, and it will get

cold brought down.

And it's just a continuous cycle of cooling the air

in your home.

The other type is direct use geothermal, which is directly

using water that is naturally heated by the earth.

Now what we know is hot springs, right?

We all know that, and that is just groundwater that

has found some sort of crack or fissure that allowed

it to rise towards the surface.

That's basically what we're using with direct use.

Geothermal. It's just that hot spring is down below and

it's sealed.

It's enclosed within the soil below the ground, so we

drill some sort of pipe down into that water, and

then we just use that hot water.

Basically, that hot water gets pumped up to the surface,

and we use it now once, and you can use

it in a bunch of different things.

Like I said, the heating your house, just using the

hot water, those kinds of things.

After that, the cold water after it's used, it becomes

cold, and that gets, it'll get, Um, it'll refill that

reservoir from down there, and then you just keep reusing

it, Um, now some some geothermal direct use systems.

You actually will need to refill this reservoir every once

in a while, especially when it's like some huge complex.

We're using a lot, a lot of water.

It will need refilling sometimes.

So that is one small gabby out to it.

And the other type is deep geothermal systems, which is

harnessing the power of steam deep underground.

But that's the thing is it's not actually steam yet.

See deep, deep underground, there is extremely hot water.

We're talking hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit so hot that it

really should be steam at that point.

But the pressure that far down actually keeps it in

a liquid state.

And so we drill deep and it is deep.

This is this system has theme, most expensive upfront cost,

but it can be used for a different purpose.

We'll see it.

You you have to drill really far down, and then

you get to that hot water and then it gets

pumped up, sometimes naturally, just because of the pressure that's

pushing it, it will get pumped up to the surface

now, once it gets to a certain depth, there's not

enough pressure to keep it in a liquid state anymore.

So it actually becomes steam.

And then that superheated steam is then used for other

purposes the same purposes we talked about before.

But also, this steam can be used to spin a

turbine which will then create electricity.

Um, which is why, yes, This is the most expensive

system up front, but it can also be used for

the most important thing or a more important thing so

it can be worth it.

Um, then that steam it will be.

It becomes water at that point, and then after that's

cold, it'll go back down now.

Another difference with this is all the other systems.

They were a closed circuit loop where you would be

directly using the hot water and cold water again and

again. And it would be reheating itself here, partly because

it's just so deep down you need to use a

lot of pipe.

But also it's just the way it works.

You actually we just dropped that water in the soil

and we let it naturally dispersed back into the soil

where it will heat up again, and then we'll use

it again.

So it is still a loop, but it's not a

directly closed loop.

We just kind of let it naturally dispersed.

And a Geiser is basically what happens when this sort

of imagine this sort of pump.

But it's naturally it.

This hot steam finds a natural fisher in the surface

that steam erupts and it becomes a geiser.

So why switch to this kind of energy consumption?

Well, there are a couple different reasons now.

We remember how I said that US has the most

usage. See, we have 3676 megawatts of electric.

That's how much we produce and our closest competitors, Indonesia,

with 2133.

That's a big difference.

So we are the leading user.

However, we only do it in these certain states.

See, most geothermal resource is our near the boundaries of

the Earth's tectonic plates.

Where remember, I said it needs to find that, like

natural Fisher Well, a boundary of a tectonic plate is

the perfect natural Fisher.

And here Yeah, this is the U.

S. Primary energy consumption by 2019 will end of 2019,

I believe, start of 2020.

This is the data.

The majority of our electric energy consumption comes from petroleum

and natural gas Onley, 11% of it is renewable, and

only 2% of our total energy consumption is geothermal.

And think about that.

We are the leaving use of user user of geothermal

energy, and only 2% of our energy actually comes from

that. The world is not taking advantage of this type

of energy as much as it should at all.

And another big thing.

It's very, very cheap.

The yeah, the up front cost is the most is

pretty much all of the cost.

The only other thing is maintenance, and that only rages

from one cent to three cents per kilowatt hour.

Now the consumer, he only has Thio.

He or she only has to pay five cents per

kilowatt hour.

And this is a table of a bunch of different

energy systems that the US used.

And this is from 2009 through 2019.

Um, it has all the different, um, energy systems, nuclear

fossil, steam, hydro electric, Esther, right.

And it actually breaks it up into the different costs.

There's the operation.

There's maintenance cost.

There's fuel costs and Then there's the total.

And at the very end, that's 2019, um, and you'll

see. Like for nuclear, it's the number is 23.73 That's

a weird number.

It's because it's in mils per kilowatt hour and mill

a mill is just 1/1000 of a dollar and 1/10

of a cent.

I believe the only reason they did this was to

make the number smaller, so I went ahead and did

the math.

But you just got it.

You got to divide that number by 10 to turn

into kilowatts per hour.

You just moved the decimal.

The total cost of nuclear energy per kilowatt hour is

$2.372.37. Fossil steam $3.67.

Hydro electric, $1.8 and then gas turbine and some other

small scale energy sources.

$2.83 since per kilowatt hour.

So fossil steam $3.67 opposed to five cents per kilowatt

hour using geothermal electric.

So it's definitely not a resource that is being taken

advantage of that.

I think most people are worried about that upfront costs,

but it will literally pay for itself both monetarily and

most importantly, environmentally.

So the one big caveat is it cannot power transportation

vehicles. But that brings up a point that I think

a lot of people need to understand.

I don't think there's going to be one single renewable

energy source that is going to cater to all of

our energy needs.

That's just almost impossible.

It's definitely going to be a mixture of different renewable

energy sources.

And see this graph is just, um, Iceland's energy consumption

again pointing out that they still use 15% fossil fuels

because of transportation.

But there's not gonna be just one type of energy

source that is going to be used, and it's gonna

fix all of our needs.

Um, it's going to be a combination, and the problem

is, people are not using geothermal as much as they

should. It's, um, it's going to be a mix of

a bunch of different types, but geothermal is not being

used as much as it can be.

So yeah, this was geothermal energy, and I hope that

I have convinced you that maybe this is something that

we should tap into

Alternative Energy Presentation - Erik Holmer

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