If we decided to scrap the Yellowstone national park and instead turned it into the Yellowstone national power plant how much energy could it conceivably produce?
One thing to keep in mind is that generating power thermally requires heat and cold. The amount of power you can extract is directly proportional to the difference between the heat reservoir and the cold reservoir.
Yellowstone has a lot of heat. But how much cold does it have? There’s a good sized lake there but once it warms up, then what? There’s some small rivers and those aren’t enough to give a really immense amount of cold to match the heat available. Plus there’s the thermal pollution downstream.
So that leaves cooling towers. Lots and lots of cooling towers. Which will need quite a bit of water. So the total amount of water available is another limit. You can add more water by dams.
But water recycling is limited. Most will be pumped back into the lake. Warmer than usual but not really hot. However that cuts down on your thermal efficiency. Some will be lost due to evaporation. Some heat will be lost to the air. (Which would be a great place to dump the heat*, but the transfer rate without water is lousy.)
More expert people can run the numbers but keep in mind it’s going to limited by how much cooling you can do.
- Note that over the very long term, you aren’t actually adding “extra” heat to the atmosphere. The heat was going to reach the surface anyway.
It would not be much on a national or global scale. We know this because the US already has at least 32 geothermal power plants, and is the world’s largest producer of geothermal electricity:
Yet this is only about 0.38% of total US generation:
http://globalenergyobservatory.org/list.php?db=PowerPlants&type=Geothermal
In 2015 total annual US geothermal energy production was 16.77 terawatt hours. A single average nuclear or conventional plant generates about 8 terawatt hours. So all the geothermal plants in the US produce about the same annual energy as two conventional or nuclear plants. Shutting down Yellowstone to put geothermal plants there likely wouldn’t make that much difference.
Walking through a geothermal area aesthetically feels like there’s a lot of potential power to harness. However it cannot actually produce that much energy relative to existing sources. Even if cubic kilometers of molten magma could somehow be tapped for high-temperature geothermal energy, at typical conversion rates this would not make a big difference in the overall world energy scenario. Furthermore there is no known technique for high-temperature energy extraction from molten rock on an industrial scale.
This blog post I found goes into the specifics:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/warm-and-fuzzy-on-geothermal/
Not to mention, Yellowstone has been known to make major renovations, which is not a very productive thing for fixed structures.
The hot water underground could drive turbines directly. Generally a two part system would be used so that the hot ground water would heat clean water flashing it to steam to drive a turbine, and the clean water would be cooled in a tower for reuse although it could be just dumped back into the ground.
This is a fascinating topic, and it reminds me of a long-running question I have had concerning our great treasure of Yellowstone National Park.
I visited Yellowstone about four years ago. Had a fairly thorough and extensive stay and tour of the area. My then-wife and I stayed at a nearby hotel for two nights and during the day did the whole tourist deal. We were on our way to Cody, WY and then to Sheridan, WY to check out some land that I inherited in a Will.
I must say left Yellowstone feeling a bit disappointed. And also worried about its future. There were many hundreds of acres of dead or diseased trees. True, some of them had been killed or damaged in a past wildfire, but some had been attacked by pests or–anbd this part I was told by a Ranger–poisoned in their root systems by underground toxins.
Basically I learned that Yellowstone was (is?) in great peril. Global Warming and drought was blamed for some of its troubles. Also something about the undergound sulfur and other chemicals that are common in that particular geological region. I was told it is a good idea for anybody wishing to visit Yellowstone to hurry up and see it, as it is not going to get any better and is on the decline. And will perhaps decline to a point to where it is not even worth visiting–perhaps Park closure?–within two decades.
So…finally, my point! LOL. I wonder if anybody reading this has kept abreast of the Yellowstone situation? And can you tell me what the current prognosis is? I have been very busy and have sort of last track of its situation. I really hope things have improved there.
And no…I would be totally against converting it into a Power Plant of any sort. At least not while it is a National Park.
Thanks for your time.
Fire, pests, and underground toxins have been features of Yellowstone for hundreds of thousands of years. Outgassings also kill wildlife in the area. Unless you can provide a cite showing that this sort of thing has significantly intensified in recent decades I’d say this is all part of life in the region.
What, the mega-giant underground magma chamber is going to go away or something? Much of what makes the area distinctive are the effects of the supervolcano underneath the park - and that isn’t going anywhere. The geysers, hotsprings, canyons, and so forth will all endure. Yes, the trees and wildlife will get a bit re-arranged but that’s normal, too.
Define “improved”. What, exactly, does that mean to you?
Well, it might be going somewhere, that somewhere being “up”. But if that happens, North America, and in fact most of the Northern Hemisphere, will be rather on the decline.