Earth Equity News

In the Push to Develop Alternative Energy, What Happened to Geothermal? By Kent Garber, US News & World Report, July 21, 2008. "In an energy speech last week in Washington... Al Gore might have surprised a few people by identifying geothermal... along with [the more familiar] wind and solar... Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama rarely mention [it]... except, perhaps, when visiting Nevada... The current level of interest, experts say, is only a fraction of what it could be, because the geothermal industry has fallen victim to the harsh vicissitudes of Washington politics... most obvious in the Bush administration's attempt, two years ago, to cut the DOE's geothermal program... [and its request for] no money for geothermal in its annual budget. 'They were going to zero it out,' says John Lund, director of the Oregon Institute of Technology's Geo-Heat Center. 'They said we were a mature technology and that we didn't need support.' Congress eventually scraped together about $5 million and saved the program... But cutbacks in the past year and a half have been unavoidable... Geothermal didn't get [tax credits like wind and solar] until 2005... There are plenty of reasons to be cautious... Compared with solar and wind, the cost of commercializing geothermal is high. In most cases, expensive wells must be drilled deep into the ground... Geothermal power plants are still restricted to a handful of western states where the ground is more geologically active. Capturing geothermal energy elsewhere in the country... on a commercial scale would require new technology. There are also environmental concerns... But geothermal energy does have some significant advantages... For one thing, unlike wind and solar power, [it can be] generated constantly -- 24 hours a day, seven days a week... One particularly ripe concern at the moment: making sure Congress renews tax credits for geothermal energy and other renewable energy, many of which expire at the end of the year."