In short, you pick a thermally hot area, like Newberry, Yellowstone, or Mammoth, and you pump water in, and pump water out.
Now, a factoid for those not ‘up’ on volcanoes…
There’s a reason most volcanos happen about 70 to 90 miles from a subduction zone, as in, the Pacific Ring of Fire. The subducted plate dives down at about a 45 degree angle, loaded with, of course, ocean bottom water, and at a predictable depth meets, yes, heat, which boils that water, which helps lubricate all that hot rock. A lot of heat. A lot of water. 70 miles inland is where the angle of descent meets the hot rock and the column of watery heat riseth upward—bringing hot, as in molten, rock with it.
What about landlocked volcanoes? They sit above a different kind of hot spot, a mantle plume, which is where the core’s heat has just overflowed upward: these plumes last for eons, and actually stay in one spot as the earth’s plates migrate over them, so you will see ‘strings’ of volcanoes: Hawaii is one. Yellowstone is one. There’s another in New Mexico which may or may not be a plume… These usually don’t blow up so much as produce boilouts of magma, as in the Deccan Traps, the Siberian Traps (so named because of the ‘stairstep’ mode of basalt columns that form as a result…[traps is similar to the Norwegian word for stairs.])
And then there are the big splits in the Earth, the midocean ridges, one of which goes on land in Iceland, and becomes visible to hikers who want to play tag with volcanoes buried under glaciers…
Well, Iceland uses this sort of power quite successfully. Their part of the ridge is so waterlogged already, they’re really another issue…they get steam. A lot of steam.
Injecting water to produce steam in something like Newberry, which is not that near the coast, and which is really a type B, a plume sort, as opposed to A or C, is an interesting venture. As they say, 200 small earthquakes and the requirement to secure your china collection would be a bit of a burden for an area, but cheap nearly-forever electricity would be nice…granted they understand this beast as well as they hope they do. It should NOT blow up. It should not do much but rumble and thump as cooler water fills the cracks and heats up and moves on. And it could produce a lot of power.
We shall see.
Looking at that geothermal map, I see a purple spot in the middle of eastern Washington. I think Spokane is further east, but I’m not sure.
And yes, geothermal looks like a good steady renewable energy source, unlike wind or solar. That 10 megawatts is more than a third of Ontario’s total requirements. Nothing out east here, though, and hydro-electric is pretty well tapped out already. So we are stuck with conservation until we get some good energy storage technologies.
You’ve got some geo-unsettledness going bang-thump out there in Ontario, I think but it’s not a certified heat source.
We have something going on by Chelan that goes bump now and again..but that purple spot is right over the hill from Spokane—interesting: you climb a bit on I-90, past the airport, then hit an area of old flood basalt, and it’s been right quiet for a long time. We had an earthquake, but that area didn’t. Curious. I wouldn’t have thought that was still ‘hot’ there, but there are some old features south of George (yes, George, WA.)that could have been geothermal. MOst of the ‘hot springs’ and such are over on the Olympic Peninsula, or associated with the volcanic areas like Baker.
I would dearly love to install some renewable energy producers/users, like photovoltaics on the roof and a EV car for commuting. The turn-off is the initial outlay: how many people have $10-75k laying about for the first run of panels, and/or a car? And if we went that route, we’d need to completely redo the roof anyhow; thirty year old shingles would simply wilt under the stress.
In Massachusetts, we have superb state tax credits to encourage people to put solar panels up on their roofs. The electric companies are also required by state (I believe it is, but it might be a regional agreement) law to generate a certain, fairly large percent of their energy from renewable resources. Voila, some enterprising companies are now entering into agreements with homeowners to erect “rental” solar panels atop roofs that are sunny enough. The parties sign a 20 year agreement (transferable to new owners of the home), pay for and erect the panels for an agreed upon entry fee (the more the homeowner pays upfront the cheaper their fixed rate of electricity over the timespan) and then the company recoups the tax credit and the electric company adds that puny but multiplicative % of renewable energy to their tally sheet.
Unfortunately, we found upon the solar engineer’s inspection of our roof that the large trees just beyond our western property line cast a bit too much shadow for tax credit qualifying and the solar company is no longer interested in doing business with us. We were psyched for a while, though.
But yes, you do have to have a new roof (ours was replaced last year).
But, but….having watched a few shows on Discovery Channel, they said that the Yellowstone Supercaldera is a potential to erupt, since they estimate the frequency to be every 600,000 years, and the last eruption of that supercaldera was over 600,000 years ago. I know that there is a small amount of drift from where the land was situated over the plume, but it’s not been that much. If Yellowstone goes, there goes the nation’s breadbasket, not to mention the “nuclear winter” we’d be experiencing.
Global warming is always subject to the whim of the earth’s core…blow up Toba, Tambora, Yellowstone, or Anak Krakatau, or Lakhi, not to mention let the African Rift decide to become a flood basalt, and we could all be ordering parkas.
Well, if you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much room!
For those of us interested in the Cascadia Subduction Zone:
In Effingham Inlet, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, these sediments reveal disturbances we interpret were caused by earthquakes. With our very detailed age model that includes 68 radiocarbon dates and the Mazama Ash [i.e. Crater Lake formation] deposit (a volcanic eruption that took place 6800 yrs ago); we have identified 22 earthquake shaking events over the last 11,000 years, giving an estimate of a recurrence interval for large and megathrust earthquakes of about 500 years. However, it appears that the time between major shaking events can stretch up to about a 1,000 years. The last megathrust earthquake originating from the Cascadia subduction zone occurred in 1700 AD. Therefore, we are now in the risk zone of another earthquake.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130612133140.htm