Leaders in the geothermal industry came together last month and admitted a hard truth: Geothermal energy isn’t well understood by the public. And to change that, geothermal companies need to come together and work on clear messaging and visuals to help educate the world about geothermal’s potential.
To do so, Kristina Hagström-Ilievska, chief marketing officer at geothermal company Baseload Capital, brought big names in the geothermal market together for a Declaration of Communication to start a united campaign explaining what geothermal is.
“The [geothermal] bottleneck [is] always that I have to stop to explain it in order to continue to talk about it,” Hagström-Ilievska told Tech Brew. “This is actually a problem. We need more airtime to get more investments, but we don’t get airtime, so we don’t get investments.”
What is geothermal energy?
Geothermal is energy derived from heat stored within the earth’s crust, or rock underground. That heat can be in the form of steam or hot water. Geothermal energy can be used directly for heating or indirectly by converting it into electricity, and is extracted by drilling wells into the ground.
Because geothermal energy depends on pulling something out of the Earth, like oil and natural gas, it might not seem like a renewable energy source at first glance. But geothermal sources regenerate over time—some quicker than others—so “that energy is continually percolating up to the surface,” Cornell University Professor of Sustainable Energy Systems Jefferson Tester told Tech Brew.
“Some geothermal wells that are producing fluid have been doing it for 75 years or so with certainly no decline,” Tester said. “Others, though, show decline because it’s not recharging fast enough from the earth.”
That said, geothermal companies can use technology to create geothermal energy where there is heat but a lack of underground fluid, making sources of geothermal energy abundant. And unlike some other renewable energy sources, geothermal is always available and not dependent on weather.
But despite geothermal’s tenure and enormous potential, it’s still considered an “emerging” technology. Tester told Tech Brew he thinks the reason geothermal isn’t as well-known as solar or wind energy is simple: It’s underground.
“You can’t look at a geothermal system underground like you can look at a wind turbine or a solar field,” Tester said. “Everybody can feel the wind and they can feel the sun, but they really have a hard time appreciating what’s underneath their feet in terms of hotter rock.”
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And because geothermal is underground, it also takes more money and time to set up than solar panels or wind turbines. That’s because geothermal that can be converted into electricity comes from deeper in the earth than the kind used for heating, meaning it takes more energy to bring to the surface. Like manufacturing green hydrogen, though, the power used to ferry geothermal energy above ground can be renewable.
Geothermal heating pumps
Despite struggling with obscurity, geothermal had its big break recently thanks to heating pumps. Over a million homes in the US are heated by geothermal pumps, which pull heat from trenches six to 10 feet below ground, or wells that are approximately 500 feet underground.
“[Heat pumps] convinced people that, ‘Hey, this stuff might not be as far off as I think,’” Tester said.
That’s why Tester believes the best way the US can make use of geothermal energy is to use it as the main source of heating in the northern states, which rely on fossil fuels for heating more than other regions in the country.
“That’s where I think geothermal could be the future in many ways,” Tester told Tech Brew. “But we’ve got to make it work better, and we’ve got to get the cost down.”
Barriers to investment
And as things stand, the geothermal exploration phase, wherein researchers assess potential geothermal zones and resources, depends on large initial investments—investments that Tester said geothermal companies and federal or state governments should go in on together.
Hagström-Ilievska’s Declaration of Communication reached the same conclusion: “[We] want geothermal companies and associations to focus on growing the industry rather than competing with one another,” the open letter reads. Hagström-Ilievska told Tech Brew that she takes inspiration from the solar industry’s united front.
“They haven’t been selling different technologies of solar,” she said. “They’ve been selling solar—period.”
That’s why she hopes the industry can coalesce around one clear definition of geothermal, one hashtag to use on social media, and a set of publicly available images startups can use to market geothermal and explain it to potential investors.
“If we unite around a way of visualizing, talking about geothermal and so on, it doesn’t mean that you cannot market your own company,” Hagström-Ilievska said. “We just need to unite around the top layer.”