OT Geothermal energy

Loading thread data ...

Been talked about for several decades. The Rosemanowes 'hot rocks' project in Cornwall in the 1970's was one such.

formatting link
came to anything, even though it was said the be the site in the UK with the highest heat flow in England at 120 milliwatts per square metre (which sounds rather small to me; if correct, perhaps it's not surprising nothing came of it).

There are a few other sites across the world, but mostly you need hot rock not too far below the surface, otherwise it becomes too expensive to exploit. Iceland is often given as an example, and great claims made for it and how the UK will benefit from an interconnector up to Iceland, which seems to have gone quite. But Iceland's total geothermal capacity is only 750MW, so they don't make much use of it themselves.

formatting link

Reply to
Chris Hogg

<snipped>

Small scale use here...

formatting link

Reply to
Clive Arthur

They make a lot of use of it for heating and presumably don't use it more for electricity generation because they have even cheaper hydro power, pretty much everyone's favourite renewable.

I don't think it is an indication of how much power they could generate economically from geothermal.

Reply to
Pancho

CEGB were doing research on this in the 1970s from the Marchwood Engineering Labs, on the Solent. Conveniently, this region is another reasonable hot spot.

IIRC there turned out to be two issues, I think the main ones was that the output would drop off significantly after ~ 50 years because you would have cooled off such a lot of rock by then, and the other was you lose something like half of the water that you pump down.

I think that Marchwood were also looking at wave power (who remembers Salter's ducks?) and windmills. Prior to that they had quite a substantial rig looking into Magnetohydrodynamics.

formatting link

Reply to
newshound

Which often uses fracking type technology. I'm sure there will be even more complaints about tremors.

Reply to
Fredxx

A corner of the pool will be partially heated by a geothermal borehole. It used to be the kiddies corner when I swam there in about

1955; it's the area separated off by the curved wall in one of the images on this account
formatting link
.

But when drilling the borehole, they had to stop because they hit a patch of high water flow. I don't know exactly what that means, but I assume that it was a geological fault or some-such, so that water they pumped down to be heated just leaked away instead of coming back up to the surface, but that may not be the explanation. Whatever, they're having to supplement the geothermal heating by conventional heat pumps.

It always struck me as a ridiculously expensive scheme. Virtue signalling writ large!

Reply to
Chris Hogg

I think this is because its bloody dangerous. There is a lot of energy, but its very destructive energy. Have you ever tipped a bucket of water down a bore hole on Lanzerote? Best run quick if you try it.

Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff (Sofa

There is this that works:

formatting link

Reply to
Richard

HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.