I’ve been wondering.
The Geysers, a geothermal power area in Northern California, produces 750 MW of electrical power. That’s a lot. What I wonder about is, what is the effect if any, of removing so much heat from the system. I don’t know the efficiency factor, but it must take a lot of heat to make so much electricity.
So, can removing that much heat have any negative effect on the Earth? How about if we add in the cooling effects of solar and wind power?
Nothing’s free, right?
Come to think of it, is the power harvested from falling water (gravity) free? Okay, I understand that one. Back to heat.
Peace,
mangeorgr
I doubt it has any negative effect on the earth, since the electricity is soon turned into heat again anyway.
A 750Mw power plant is unlikely to cause a problem. This site says:
Since more heat is constantly being produced within the Earth by radioactive decay and tidal effects, and since it all radiates away anyway, when it comes to the heat all you are doing is slightly speeding up a natural process. And the scale involved is gigantic; unless we start extracting the kind of heat that it would take to fry the surface of the planet ( a tad counterproductive, even if we could pull it off ), we aren’t going to have a significant effect on something the size of Earth’s interior.
You could have local effects, cooling the local area you are extracting the heat from. And you will be using water, and creating steam which could both have ecological effects. Especially if we are talking about the proposed techniques for “hot dry rock” geothermal, since in that case you’d be making your own geothermal setup and not tapping into a preexisting natural one like the Geysers. Although on the plus side I understand you’d have lower or no problems with sulfur like you do with naturally volcanically fed geothermal.