Climate Climate & Energy

In coal country, mining is destroying cemeteries and faith

James Bowe, a lifelong resident of Whitesville, W.Va., knows the mountains around his home better than he knows himself. He’s seen friends and family buried there, and has devoted countless hours to protecting his loved ones’ resting places and the Indian burial grounds that stand alongside them. So when Bowe pulled up on his four-wheeler […]

Vail Hails Gales

Vail Resorts to be second-biggest corporate wind-power buyer in U.S. Colorado-based ski-resort company (and one-time eco-vandal target) Vail Resorts announced this week that it will buy enough wind power to offset all of the electricity it uses at its five ski areas, as well as in its corporate offices and stores. The company’s promise to […]

Geothermal energy

In yesterday's MIT Technology Review there's an interview with Jefferson Tester, who claims that geothermal power is a potential game-changer in the energy world.

Technology Review: How much geothermal energy could be harvested?

Jefferson Tester: The figure for the whole world is on the order of 100 million exojoules or quads [a quad is one quadrillion BTUs]. This is the part that would be useable. We now use worldwide just over 400 exojoules per year. So you do the math, and you know you've got a very big source of energy.

How much of that massive resource base could we usefully extract? Imagine that only a fraction of a percent comes out. It's still big. A tenth of a percent is 100,000 quads. You have access to a tremendous amount of stored energy. And assessment studies have shown that this is thousands of times in excess of the amount of energy we consume per-year in the country. The trick is to get it out of the ground economically and efficiently and to do it in an environmentally sustainable manner. That's what a lot of the field efforts have focused on.

The idea is to break up super-hot rock way down in the earth, flood it with water that absorbs the heat, and bring the water back up, in effect mining the heat. Tester says the technology's been successfully demonstrated and we could have commercial-scale plants up and running within 10 to 15 years.

The advantage over other renewables is that geothermal provides steady baseload power:

One Leak’s Notice

Russian pipeline leak causes oil price spike As global oil production nears its peak and developing countries just keep developing, the tension between supply and demand has become so taut that the slightest perturbation can wreak havoc. Exhibit A: this weekend, a Russian pipeline to central and Eastern Europe sprung a leak near the border […]

Drop It Like It’s Hot

Heat wave shuts down nuclear reactors in Europe Remember how nuclear power was going to save us from global warming? Heh. Funny story. As Europe has gotten, you know, warm lately, a handful of nuclear power plants have been forced to reduce or stop production. Seems the continent’s relentless heat wave has warmed the rivers […]

That Darn Pat

Coal-fired cooperative coughs up cash to climate crank Say you don’t like the results of climate science. What to do? Us, we suffer from night terrors. But the Colorado-based Intermountain Rural Electric Association — a group heavily invested in coal-burning utilities — is going with the fossil-fuel industry’s favorite alternate strategy: buy more favorable science! […]

And You Were Thinking It Couldn’t Get Worse

Oil spill and power-plant fire wreak havoc in already-havoc-stricken Lebanon Bombed by Israel two weeks ago, a storage fuel tank of a power plant in Beirut, Lebanon, is still burning, filling the air with dangerous fumes; another exploded, sending at least 10,000 tons of oil into the Mediterranean Sea. Particulate pollution could waft as far […]

And the Wind Cries Scary

Pacific Northwest ocean dead zone getting larger Researchers believe global warming is behind a recurring low-oxygen “dead zone” in the Pacific Northwest ocean. Triggered by north winds, a process called upwelling encourages the growth of phytoplankton blooms; when the water calms, the phytoplankton die for lack of nutrients, sink to the bottom, and rot, using […]

It’s Like Rain on Your Wedding Day

New Arctic Refuge drilling bill would spend proceeds on alt-energy The recurring nightmare of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is back, but with a new twist: proceeds would support alternative energy. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is introducing a bill today to open 2,000 acres of the refuge to oil drilling. Backers of the […]

So That’s Why It’s Called Death Valley

Climate change threatens national parks in the western U.S. Glacier National Park without glaciers? If global warming keeps on keepin’ on, 12 of the most famous U.S. national parks are at serious risk, says a report released yesterday by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization. Temperatures in the Western U.S. […]