Geothermal

The Obama administration's federal stimulus package propelled the geothermal and solar energy industries to record growth in 2009 while most of the economy struggled.

But industry anxiety is rising over the lack of a long-term policy signal from Washington. This week, trade groups again warned lawmakers that relying solely on short-term support to boost clean energy could eventually sink their industries.

As part of the push, the groups called on U.S. Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to keep his word to unleash the torrent of solar and geothermal projects proposed for America's public lands.

The International Energy Agency projects that global energy demand will increase 46 percent by 2030, requiring an investment of $26.3 trillion in energy infrastructure to meet the expected demand.

Revamping our energy system and doing so with more renewable energy will take substantial funding, and while some countries, like China, are investing in the whole cleantech pipeline, from “lightbulb to lightbulb” — from idea to implementation, as Google puts it — the U.S. is investing in cleantech only sporadically.

“We need to invest across that whole spectrum, and we need to make that sustained,” said Bill Weihl, Google’s Green Energy Czar.

Google, for one, is putting its money where its mouth is.

A new report claims the world can scale up eight clean technologies so massively and rapidly they could meet 60 percent of new energy demand and abate more CO2 than is necessary for climate stabilization in just 10 years.

Naturally, this scale-up won't come cheap. The report estimates that annual private investment worldwide would need to triple between now and 2020 to reach $500 billion to $800 billion per year:

At this scale, clean energy investments would be in line with fossil-fuel investments.

This is not as far-fetched as it seems. Current global investment plans for maintaining and expanding energy infrastructure are on the order of $13 trillion over the next 10 years. The United States alone has a planned investment of close to $1 trillion.

Shift a sizable chuck of that money into ready cleantech solutions, the authors argue, and the results would be world changing: climate mitigation, energy security and 5 million new jobs planetwide.

By the middle of next year, the nine campuses that make up the nation's largest community college system plan to be completely energy self-sufficient.

It's a huge step, and it will begin saving money immediately.

The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) started down this path in 2001, the year voters approved the first part of $5.7 billion in bond funding to renovate the campuses.

The LACCD Board of Trustees was thinking about much-needed modernization work and its first new construction in 35 years, but it was also thinking ahead. It passed a sustainable building policy mandating that all new buildings that use 50% or more of bond funding be LEED certified. The board had previously developed a renewable energy plan that aimed for a minimum 10% renewable energy standard.

At the time, the trustees were afraid that anything beyond that would be too costly, says Larry Eisenberg, executive director of Facilities, Planning and Development for the LACCD.

The system's chancellor and the implementation team saw greater potential, though.

They looked at the campuses' energy costs – around $9 million a year, growing to $10 million by 2010 – and realized that ramping up renewable power would be a money-saving move. The chancellor at the time, Darroch “Rocky” Young, adopted the 100% renewable energy goal as a budgetary measure.

“What began as an environmental policy turned into a budget initiative,” Eisenberg says, “and that’s where it’s been ever since.”

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• Leslie Berliant's blog
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Raser Technologies’ financial history is not terribly flattering.

Last December, Motley Fool was singling the company out as a poster child for debt-ridden businesses with no discernible free cash flow, based on the firm’s $80 million in long-term debt and its paltry $284,000 in reported revenue.

The company had struggled unsuccessfully for years to profit from its Symetron AC motor technology, which it had been marketing as an improvement over both existing AC electric motor designs (in terms of torque) and high-torque, permanent-magnet electric motors (in terms of price).

Raser's pitch included eco-conscious overtures to hybrid electric vehicle manufacturers, which may be the only logical explanation for its curious new expansion — into geothermal energy.

What’s even more curious is that it seems to be working.

Here's a startling coincidence. A first-ever assessment of Canada's shallow geothermal resources has exposed some of the country’s clearest evidence yet of global warming.

The study, published in the journal Natural Resource Research (payment required) and brought to light by Tyler Cowen in the Toronto Star, sought to evaluate the prospect of emissions-free geothermal energy down to 250 meters.

What it found was a "vast" potential of shallow hot rocks all across Canada – equivalent to more than 190 million barrels of oil. It also found that climate change was a factor.

Global warming has caused ground temperatures to climb across Canada over the past few decades, according to the research. As shallower depths warmed up, the temperature differences at 50 meters, 100 meters and 200 meters – typically large – shrunk.

The data, says study co-author Stephen Grasby of the Geological Survey of Canada, provides

"one of the best records of climate warming there is in Canada.

"Depending on where you are ground temperature has increased by a few [Celsius] degrees."

Evidence of accelerated warming is never good. But there is a silver – and even green – lining in this discovery, say the researchers. Climate-induced heat trapped inside the rocks offers the nation a shot at "significant CO2 reduction."

This fall, renewable energy startup AltaRock Energy plans to launch what could be the first U.S. demonstration of Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS). Though technical hurdles and the risk of induced earthquakes remain, experts say EGS promises to swiftly becoming a reliable, continuous source of carbon-neutral power around the globe.

America’s geothermal resource is “effectively unlimited,” according to U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and AltaRock Energy President and Chief Technology Officer Susan Petty is on a mission to tap it. With federal policy support and increased access to capital, Petty believes geothermal could supply 20 percent or more of the nation’s electricity by 2043.

EGS goes deeper than traditional geothermal, and Petty will first test its ability to work in tandem with conventional systems like those at The Geysers in Northern California where rigs are set to arrive this spring to begin work on the demonstration project. Early AltaRock Energy investors – including technology giants Kleiner Perkins, Vinod Khosla, Paul Allen and Google – are sure to be watching.

I sat down with Petty to go beneath the surface for the latest on this emerging green technology.