Projects
The NREL geothermal team is involved in various projects to help accelerate the development and deployment of clean, renewable geothermal technologies, including low-temperature resources; strategic planning, analysis, and modeling; education and workforce development; and technical monitoring.
Low-Temperature Resources
NREL supports the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Geothermal Technologies Program (GTP) through various collaborations that evaluate the levelized cost of electricity and operational data for low-temperature geothermal resources.
In August 2010, NREL and the Rocky Mountain Oilfield Testing Center (RMOTC) in Casper, Wyoming, signed a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate on the testing and development of low-temperature technologies. NREL's team will track operational data from two 280 kilowatt Organic Rankine Cycle units (one already installed and one to be installed) at RMOTC's Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 3 (Teapot Dome Oil Field) site to identify power output improvements through the year and power output improvements in warm climates. The data will help NREL and RMOTC understand the efficiencies, barriers, and operating issues of current technology and will help GTP reach the goal of developing and demonstrating low-temperature technologies to reduce costs to $0.08 per kilowatt hour by 2016.
Additionally, NREL has modeled and evaluated commercially available hybrid cooling systems that can be retrofitted to one of the RMOTC units to mitigate the decrease in net power output. NREL plans to work with RMOTC during the summer of 2011 on these system improvements.
Learn more about the low-temperature geothermal work at NREL.
Strategic Planning, Analysis, and Modeling
NREL's geothermal analysis team provides support to GTP by conducting integrated analysis on geothermal resources, including market and policy analysis, modeling tools, risk assessments, supply curve development, and transmission analysis. In addition to the projects listed below, the geothermal analysis team is also working on a web-ready permitting checklist for geothermal developers, geothermal power plant case studies, and technical reports on water use, institutional barriers, and more.
Market and Policy Analysis
NREL investigates, researches, and analyzes the latest information available to help reduce confusion and provide credible, objective answers to decision makers, such as utility regulators, policymakers, and regional developers interested in investments and policies that support new, geothermal projects.
Market and policy analysis project highlights include:
- Policymakers' Guidebooks. This website helps guide state and local officials in developing effective policies that support geothermal electricity generation and geothermal heating and cooling technologies.
- Financing Geothermal Power Projects. This website provides information for geothermal power project developers and investors interested in financing utility-scale geothermal power projects. You can also download the Guidebook to Geothermal Power Finance.
- Renewable Energy Project Finance. This website features information on project financing, market issues, and policies with a resource database, case studies and analysis on the current state of the market, a weekly blog, and more.
Additionally, the NREL geothermal team is conducting feed-in tariff analysis and adding a geothermal aspect to current renewable energy finance tracking initiatives to identify trends, barriers, and preferences in geothermal project financing.
Modeling
The NREL team develops and supports various geothermal analysis modeling tools. Currently, the team is working to broaden the development of geothermal applications in Web-based interactive tools by incorporating more geothermal resource data, such as temperature at depths and low-temperature modeling. The team plans to modify tools to estimate the costs of development for a given location and visualize other factors at a site that can affect geothermal development potential, such as land ownership, transmission line proximity, and water resources.
The NREL team is also working to develop a geothermal power generation component to the Jobs and Economic Development Model (JEDI) to estimate job development at the state level and nationwide. These results will help researchers, policy makers, investors, developers, energy advocates, and government officials understand the potential job creation benefits and economic impacts associated with geothermal power projects.
Risk Assessments
Risk assessments are used to evaluate planned and ongoing technology development activities and to provide a better understanding of the potential for research and development investments and possible impacts to utilities, environmental groups, and industry. NREL is currently working with industry to better understand the potential cost improvements in levelized cost of energy for co-produced geothermal resources, focusing on binary power plants used to generate electricity from co-produced fluids and the capital and operations and maintenance costs.
The NREL geothermal team has also conducted risk assessments for GTP's annual research, development, and demonstration portfolio. Read the 2009 and 2007 reports.
Supply Curve Development
Supply curves provide an assessment of the cost of developing geothermal resources based on resource assessments and current and future technologies. They also help characterize the supply of electricity generation potential from geothermal resources. NREL is currently developing new supply curves for co-produced, geopressured, undiscovered hydrothermal, and alternative sedimentary resources to assess the potential impact of these emerging technologies and identify low-temperature resources to help reach GTP's goal of 3 gigawatt electric low-temperature resource online by 2020.
The NREL geothermal team has also developed supply curve reports for the 2009 U.S. geothermal supply and the 2007 supply characterization.
Transmission Analysis
NREL is researching the interconnection issues affecting the four main types of geothermal electricity generation (identified and undiscovered hydrothermal, near-hydrothermal Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS), deep EGS, and co-production) and characterizing each technology's potential for utility-scale production at a single site and general strategies for addressing interconnection issues.
Education and Workforce Development
NREL leads the National Geothermal Student Competition to help university-level students cultivate skills in geothermal analysis to expand geothermal energy education and provide universities with a challenging, learning-focused geothermal energy project. The project helps to elevate the public profile of geothermal energy, DOE investments in geothermal technologies, and the potential for geothermal resources to provide a significantly larger share of the U.S. energy needs than currently.
Because NREL is located adjacent to some of the leading geophysical and renewable energy schools in the nation, the lab is also able to provide internships to students to gain workforce experience in the field of geothermal energy.
Technical Monitoring
NREL's geothermal technical monitoring team conducts geoscience and engineering technical monitoring of low-temperature, innovative exploration, and EGS projects in the field to support GTP in encouraging the development and deployment of geothermal technologies. The team collects information and feedback on exploration, reservoir engineering, drilling, permitting, stakeholder relations, project management, and environmental protection issues to optimize scientific and operational outcomes, promote well-informed decisions, anticipate and mitigate problems, and circulate lessons learned.
