C3 Energy Alternate Energy Update

 (image credit)
(Geothermal Energy)

Hello all.  Today, I want to share some information with you about Geothermal Energy.  This won’t be very long, because I’m still working on learning how to use the blog features, formatting, and studying how to control the layout for advertising, etc.  Those of you reading on RSS might want to visit me on the blog page to see what it looks like.  I’ve installed a new theme with a clean 3 column format.  I’m looking into allocating blocks of space for advertising and special offers.  Anyone familiar with Wordpress who knows how to do that, feel free to contact me at c3blogfeedback -AT- c3energy -DOT- com.

One place to get information about Alternate Energy topics is the U.S. Government EREN or Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy office.  They have a page for Geothermal Energy.  This site has a large number of links to other pages and sites.  Here is some of the information from their Geothermal Basics page.  There is much more than this.  Geothermal energy refers to the heat energy inside of the Earth.  There are several ways we can tap this energy for our use.  The first is to use power plants to produce power from the heat.  The types of plants include: dry steam, flash steam, and binary-cycle.  The second common way to make use of geothermal resources is called direct use.  This simply means that the hot water from the Earth is piped directly into facilities to use for heating.  While the article doesn’t say this, I would think that the hot water might be usable for cooling, through absorption chillers, if the working temperatures are adequate.  The third main method of taking advantage of geothermal resources is the Geothermal Heat Pump, or GHP.  This takes advantage of the fact that the ground temperature in most places stays between 50 deg F and 60 deg F.  Bodies of water usually stay even cooler.  A GHP extracts heat from a building in the summer and sends it into the ground or into water rather than into the air.  In the winter, the process is reversed.  This creates efficiencies much greater than normal air source heat pumps.  Geothermal Energy represents a clean, reliable, renewable, and local resource in many parts of the U.S. and the world.

Obviously, this is just the briefest introduction to this topic.  Whole collections of books have been written on this topic.  Here are a few additional resources for further research:

• Google Search for “geothermal energy” - returns 1.3 million results
• Pure Energy Systems Geothermal Energy page
• PESWiki Geothermal page
• WikiPedia Geothermal page

I find the concept very interesting.  This is another example of how nature is just waiting to give us free or cheap energy.  We just have to take it.  For those who have an interest or knowledge of this topic, I encourage you to send me a comment via the blog site.

If you wish to subscribe to the blog, please see the RSS links at the bottom or the RSS widgets on the side of the blog page.

Copyright (c) 2007 by Ron Frazier

You may cite or quote me for non-commercial purposes as long you do not change the content and as long as you provide a link back to the source:  http://c3energy.com/blog/wordpress/ .

The Permalink for this article is:
http://c3energy.com/blog/wordpress/2007/09/19/the-heat-under-your-feet-geothermal-energy/

Track comments for this article through the RSS feed.