Leading companies in the U.S. geothermal industry have told
President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team that “Geothermal is Good
for America.”
In a brief paper outlining the state of the geothermal industry and
technology, the Geothermal
Energy Association (GEA), the industry’s trade group, said,
“Geothermal delivers a triple bottom line to our energy system: It is an
abundant domestic energy source, it brings economic benefits in the form
of taxes and long term high-paying jobs, and it has one of the lowest
Levelized Costs of Energy (LCOE) of all power sources in the United
States.”
“We hope the new Administration will recognize the benefits of
geothermal energy,” said Karl Gawell, the Geothermal Energy
Association’s Executive Director. “Their leadership in addressing some
of the daunting obstacles facing geothermal development could mean
positive change for the industry.”
The industry group paper spells out other benefits of geothermal
including support for a reliable, modern power grid. “Known to be a
baseload generation technology, advancements in geothermal production
make it possible to provide ancillary and on-demand services, such as
load-following or energy imbalance services, spinning reserves,
non-spinning reserves, and replacement or supplemental reserves. This
helps load serving entities avoid additional costs from purchasing and
then balancing intermittent resources with storage or new transmission.”
GEA also points to producing strategic minerals from geothermal
resources as another new advantage. “Exciting opportunities in
extracting minerals from geothermal brines could bring the U.S. new
sources of lithium, zinc, manganese, potash and rare earth minerals, now
dominated by China,” according to GEA.
The industry paper tells the President-elect that they are facing
daunting impediments to development. “The U.S. is the world leader in
utility-scale geothermal production. Unfortunately that lead has been
slipping as asymmetrical market-subsidies undercut new U.S. geothermal
development, federal regulation created duplicative hurdles to
development, and investment in new technology development by the U.S.
has lagged,” GEA reports.
“There are over 30 Gigawatts of geothermal capacity in the U.S. with 83
active projects (over 1,250 MW) stuck in development limbo,” GEA points
out. To move geothermal forward, the trade group calls for risk
reduction in drilling and exploration, certainty and parity in tax
incentives, and streamlined permitting on public lands.
A full copy of “Geothermal is Good for America” will be available at: www.geo-energy.org.
Press should contact karl@geo-energy.org
for a copy.
About the Geothermal Energy Association:
The Geothermal Energy Association (GEA) is a trade association comprised
of U.S. companies that support the expanded use of geothermal energy and
are developing geothermal resources worldwide for electrical power
generation and direct-heat uses. For more information, please visit http://www.geo-energy.org.
Subscribe to GEA’s newsletter here. Follow GEA on Twitter.
Become a fan on Facebook.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170118006170/en/
Copyright Business Wire 2017
Source: Business Wire
(January 18, 2017 - 2:28 PM EST)
News by QuoteMedia
www.quotemedia.com