With mandated renewable energy targets in many locales and the Net Zero campaign — a commitment by many countries to decarbonize their economies by 2050 — interest in geothermal energy is growing rapidly. Many experts see it as an essential component of the world’s green-energy future because it could provide carbon-free heat and around-the-clock baseload power to compensate for the intermittency of wind and solar. Iceland, which sits on an active geological fault line, perfected the technology with its ubiquitous geothermal district heating systems. And China is embracing the move to geothermal power, currently developing more geothermal district heating systems than any other nation.
“Geothermal electricity is always on ,” said Tester. “It can provide fully dispatchable power or heat and is scalable in the same way other renewables are.”
In a recent report, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) predicted the output of geothermal in Europe could increase eight-fold by 2050. And a 2019 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) report — GeoVision: Harnessing the Heat Beneath Our Feet — refers to the “enormous untapped potential for geothermal.” By overcoming technical and financial barriers, the report says, generating electricity through geothermal methods could increase 26-fold by 2050, providing 8.5 percent of the United States’ electricity, as well as direct heat.
“GeoVision models indicate the opportunity for more than 17,500 direct-heating installations as well as heating and cooling for the equivalent of more than 28 million households using geothermal heat pumps by 2050,” wrote Susan Hamm, director of DOE’s Geothermal Technologies office.
Accessing deep geothermal is expensive and risky. But with a global focus on decarbonizing economies, many countries could offer risk-mitigation strategies and financial incentives, including tax benefits, cost sharing, and technical research. The U.S. Department of Energy, for example, has committed $150 million to the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) project in Utah as a study and test site for enhanced geothermal.