I was aware of The Geysers, a geothermal field about 35 miles north of my home in Santa Rosa, but I never gave it much thought until my first bike ride through the area. Then I learned a number of interesting things.
It’s the world’s largest geothermal field, producing more than 700 megawatts.
It accounts for 20% of California’s renewable energy.
The naturally-occurring steam was used up almost 30 years ago, and steam is now recharged by pumping in 11 million gallons of sewage effluent daily, through a 42-mile pipeline, from the Santa Rosa plain.
That daily recharge is implicated in the region’s frequent small earthquakes. (But nobody seems too worried about that, and maybe it’s a good thing? Many small better than one big?)
An article in today’s paper reports that AB-1359, signed last week by governor Gavin Newsom, paves the way for new geothermal development in the region that could add 600 megawatts of geothermal production.
How much electric power is that? I like to use WolframAlpha for quick and rough comparisons.
So, 2/3 of a nuke plant. 4/5 of a coal-fired power plant. These kinds of comparisons help me contextualize so many quantitative aspects of our lives. They’re the primary reason I visit WolframAlpha. I wish journalists would use it for that purpose.
Hi, I’ve worked with utilities on funding this sort of project (BIL/energy) over the last few years.
The reason you’re not going to see much in the way of journalistic comparisons like this is that it’s (a) still not meaningful to most people and (b) not really that meaningful, full stop. When you say “a nuclear power plant” — well, what kind? If you say the old-fashioned boiling-water plant, you immediately suggest to people that there was a choice involved and they start banging away about how that might’ve been a better idea. However, nobody’s building those because they’re wildly uneconomical and take forever to build, plus they still make people nervous. There are in-fact experimental smaller designs, certified but not yet installed much, and what they produce depends on what kind they are. Coal-fired, even worse, now you’ve kicked off a small public fight about wokeness.
As for the amounts of energy and what those mean…on the whole, people have no idea what a megawatt is, or a kilowatt-hour. The usual journalistic effort used to be “enough to power X households”, but that’s in serious flux now as we experiment with not just household size but electrification and decarbonization. I have a 4.68 kW grid-tied solar array and an energy company that does retail kWh-for-kWh credits with annual discounted cashout, and I just got my power bill, nearly the entirety of which is grid hookup fees and taxes. $0 for electricity delivered, $1.01 for gas. I don’t have an electric car or a heat pump, or anything else besides air conditioning and furnace blower fan that sucks up major juice, so even with my small array I’ve got 1.5 MWh worth of credits stored up for winter.
I know what that means in terms of pushing heating from gas to electric over the winter, but I’ve also got my place pretty well-insulated, so that little array is doing all the cooling and a substantial amount of the heating, and taking care of my household well. Is that normal? No. The average household already uses multiples of the energy mine does, and will soon see electricity use skyrocket. They’ll have one or more EVs charging at home, plus one or more heat pumps, plus many more appliances going, plus poorer insulation, and then there’s climate variation. So a journalist plugs something in and says “this will power X households,” but the assumptions are today households; when in 5-10 years it turns out that it powers X-60% average households and that there’s a bond needed for new power plants, people say “well what about when you said,” and then they decide they’re just always being lied to.
So yep, on the whole, the comms folks are inclined to leave it at “big green project will help us be green and well-powered affordably,” and then if nerds want to investigate further they can.
In fact the article did use the standard x number of households comparison.
I was more curious about comparisons to other ways of generating the same amount of power, just in an order-of-magnitude way.
Of course you can do this with LLMs too.
“a 600 MW geothermal plant is comparable in scale to mid-sized coal or natural gas plants, smaller nuclear reactors, large solar and wind farms, and mid-sized hydropower plants”
For quantitative things, esp if calculating and unit conversion are involved, I still like Wolfram.
In fact the article did use the standard x number of households comparison.I was more curious about comparisons to other ways of generating the same amount of power, just in an order-of-magnitude way.Of course you can do this with LLMs too.“a 600 MW geothermal plant is comparable in scale to mid-sized coal or natural gas plants, smaller nuclear reactors, large solar and wind farms, and mid-sized hydropower plants”For quantitative things, esp if calculating and unit conversion are involved, I still like Wolfram.
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