Many commercial and residential complexes use cooling towers to effectively aid in cooling.  An average public high school’s* cooling tower uses about 30,000 gallons of fresh water per day when it’s hot outside. That’s enough to fill a good sized back-yard swimming pool. Twice. 

A major airport can consume close to a million gallons of fresh water on a hot summer day, just for cooling tower operations. It’s great that we are honoring watering restrictions, fixing drips in faucets and leaky toilet valves; however there are billions of gallons of fresh water being evaporated and discharged into the sewer from cooling towers every day.

Cooling towers use the process of evaporative cooling to increase the energy efficiency of the air-conditioning equipment that serves the building. In the process, a lot of water is evaporated, and nearly as much more is flushed down the drain to purge out impurities.

The US had about 81 billion square feet of commercial space in 2010, served by 300 million tons of cooling capacity (based on floor space estimates from DOE report). This represents between 5-billion and 15-billion gallons of fresh water consumption each day.

Industry has begun to embrace geothermal (elimination of cooling towers) for all the right reasons:

• Elimination of water consumption associated with cooling towers
• Elimination of tower related noise
• Elimination of chemical treatment for cooling towers
• Reduction in annual maintenance costs for HVAC system
• Storm proofing through elimination of outdoor equipment (the cooling tower)
• Impressive federal tax incentives
• Reduced capital expenditures for regular cooling tower replacement

The advantages that can be cited that make a geothermal sourced building more sustainable are many. With a reduction of water consumption (which can be close to half of all the freshwater consumed by a building), your client is saving money and doing a good thing for the environment.

Cooling towers can be rather noisy, and most will agree that elimination of this outside noise would be of benefit to both the public and occupants of the building.

Geothermal sourced chiller plants and heat pumps are more efficient by design, because the condenser water is cooler than can be supplied from an evaporative cooling tower, increasing the EER (Energy Efficiency Rating) substantially.

The average life of a chiller is about three decades, and most chiller plants live through two or three cooling tower replacements. With the geothermal source, these expensive planned expenses go away.

By placing a chiller plant, or any cooling tower-sourced building using water source air-conditioners/heat pumps on a geothermal source, you have created an entirely geothermal sourced building, making the entire building’s HVAC system eligible for federal tax credits. This means that when upgrading chillers and water sourced heat pump, they may be eligible for the current tax credits for geothermal systems.

Most regions of the country and the world have storm events periodically such as hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, etc. These storm related events can destroy outside equipment. Many insurance companies will provide credits for elimination of this equipment. The New York Times said, “Geothermal Systems Arise as a Storm-Proof Resource”.  Additionally, outside equipment often needs to be winterized, and properly installed geothermal sources may save you these seasonal costs and headaches.

The federal government gives a 10% federal tax credit, and five year depreciation through the Maximum Accelerated Cost Reduction System (MACRS) on commercial geothermal systems.  With 50% bonus depreciation the first year, a $1 million upgrade can net federal tax incentives amounting to 48% of the entire cost, or federal tax incentives of $480,000.

The USGS says that the average American uses 80 to 100 gallons of water each day.   Cooling towers use as much fresh water as 50,000,000 US residents each day. I think that California could put that water to good use. This is in the neighborhood of 20% of the volume of water that flows over Niagara Falls each day (65 Billion gallons of water flow over Niagara Falls each day).

*based on national average of 752 students per high school, 2000 https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/overview/table05.asp 

In the spirit of providing collaborative leadership and information, AGI has organized Earth Science Week along with key partners since 1998 to promote awareness of the geosciences and stewardship of the planet. The program, which has grown to reach over 50 million people a year, owes its success largely to the active involvement of partners, the leading organizations that make up and represent the geoscience community.

This year's Earth Science Week will be held from October 10 - 16, 2021 and will celebrate the theme "Water Today and for the Future." The coming year's event will focus on the importance of learning how to understand, conserve, and protect water, perhaps Earth's most vital resource.

Partners contribute to Earth Science Week most substantively with the print materials, online offerings, and events that they provide for educators, students, and others to access through the program website, toolkit, and participation networks (event calendar, newsletter, etc.). While AGI produces and organizes many of the program’s key offerings independently, the bulk are submitted by partners, highlighting their respective areas of expertise within the geosciences.

A PDF of the poster that Geothermal Rising contributed to this year's Earth Science Week can be downloaded by following the link in at the top of the page.

  Geothermal Rising wishes to thank the following companies for sponsoring this year's poster:

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The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has just published the much-anticipated 2021 U.S. Geothermal Power Production and District Heating Market Report. This report provides interested stakeholders with up-to-date information and data reflecting the 2019 geothermal power production and district heating markets.

The report captures domestic capacity and usage for geothermal power production and district heating and cooling, while also discussing the impact of state and federal policy and future opportunities for the domestic geothermal market and industry.

Some of the highlights of the report include:

• United States geothermal power capacity increased from 3.627 gigawatts (GW) to 3.673 GW from the end of 2015 through the end of 2019.
• The United States brought seven new geothermal power plants online during this same timeframe, adding 186 megawatts (MW) of nameplate capacity, while 11 plants were retired or classified as nonoperational, subtracting 103 MW of nameplate capacity.
• Nine new geothermal Power Purchase Agreements have been signed across four states since late 2019, including plans for the first two geothermal power plants to be built in California in a decade.
• Geothermal companies operating in the United States have a combined 58 active developing projects and prospects across nine states.  Five of these projects are in Phase 4, the phase immediately preceding project completion.
• There are currently 23 geothermal district heating (GDH) systems in the United States. The oldest installation dates from 1892 (Boise, Idaho), and the most recent installation was completed in 2017 (Alturas, California)
• U.S. GDH systems tend to be significantly smaller in size (average of 4 MWth) than European GDH systems (continent-wide average of ~17 MWth), and orders of magnitude smaller than the average GDH system in China (~1,000 MWth)

“After working with the NREL and Geothermal Rising team on this informative and must-read report, it's clear that geothermal energy, both power plants and district-heating systems, needs significantly increased demand and resource development at the same time for substantive and sustained industry growth, as envisaged by DOE’s GeoVision report”, commented Geothermal Rising Executive Director, Will Pettitt. “To facilitate that growth the industry needs the following assistance: 1) outreach that enables the acceptance of geothermal energy as a viable clean and renewable energy source that can meet state targets, and that is differentiated from other energy sources by the character of its benefits to society; 2) technology R&D that can lead to more efficient exploration, characterization, and engineering of geothermal resources, and that expands the reach of geothermal energy to any geographic area; and, 3) incentive programs that actively de-risk resource development projects, along the lines of the successes achieved in the US in the 1980s and/or seen elsewhere around the world today, that help standardize budgeting and scheduling metrics so as to promote up-front project investment and advance exploration.”

NREL's press release announcing the publication of the report can be found here: https://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2021/new-nrel-report-details-current-state-vast-future-potential-us-geothermal-power-heat.html

If you've worked in the geothermal industry for a decade or more, you’ve invariably spent large chunks of time in out of the way places.  And to get to these places generally required hours of driving with colleagues whose company ranged from surprisingly enjoyable to never-ending.  A great conversation topic that lets the miles roll by is ranking the best highway drives. Which routes would you recommend to others for the scenery alone?

Over the years I have developed a strong bias for most roads west of Denver.  A favorite drive is out of the Mojave desert, north on CA Route 395 as it hugs the eastern Sierra Nevada en route to Reno and beyond.  Stunning sites almost everywhere on this frequently undivided road include imposing granite walls of the >10,000 foot Sierra Nevada, high alpine meadows and pine forests near Mammoth Mountain, and the expansive Mono Basin centered on Mona Lake with its nearby young volcanic landforms and iconic tufa towers (Figure 1). Just west of Mono Lake is Tioga Pass, the back door to Yosemite National Park. And east of that is 1,000 miles of broad, windy and barren deserts of the Basin and Range province.

A nondescript portion of Rte. 395 where no one stops for pictures is about 30 minutes north of Inyokern, California, several hours south of Mono Lake. Rose Valley is bordered to the west by the southern end of the high Sierra and to the east by a low set of hills and mountains, difficult to see at 75 miles an hour, called the Coso Range. A little appreciated fact is the Coso Range has been a focus of civilizations for millennia. 

The densest accumulations of rock art in North America exists in the Coso Range.  These mountains are also home to the Coso volcanic field.  Archeological investigations of petroglyphs and associated features demonstrate that aboriginals probably came to this region over 13,000 years ago. They lived in small settlements, were largely nomadic and came and went over time. Nothing is known about their cultures or how they lived beyond inferences made by archeologists from artifacts found and studied. A common thread over these thousands of years of is the fixed location of the rock art.

Features that seem to differentiate this “lakes country” of 10,000 years ago and the contemporary desert southwest from almost anywhere else are the young volcanoes and nearby hot springs. Most of the Coso Range rock art is concentrated in the 4.0-2.5 Ma basaltic andesite flows just east of the <1.0 Ma Coso volcanic field (Figures 2 and 3). Some archeologists argue that this rock art was the product of shamans who acted as spiritual leaders of their people.  Others suggest that the rock art may have played a more functional role because of the abundance of hunting images including dietary staples like antelope and sheep.

Regardless, the ground was important if not sacred to these aboriginals.  They remain an integral part of contemporary religious and spiritual practices among tribes of the region.

Thousands of years after these rock artists departed, the Navy identified this region as an ideal place to test weapons and established the China Lake military base in 1943. Hundreds of thousands of acres of mostly unpopulated rangeland in a desert that experiences clear skies year-round was ideal for their purposes.  By the early 1970s, after a decade of working at the China Lake as a shape charge expert, Dr. Carl Austin enticed the Navy to enter into a contract with a private company to develop what Austin speculated was a large geothermal reservoir situated within the Coso volcanic field.  It is speculated that these landforms and associated features attracted these first people well over 10,000 years earlier.  They continue to attract us albeit for different reasons.

This relatively unknown and easily bypassed piece of ground in the Mojave Desert has served as a nexus of different civilizations for over ten thousand years. To say that all were drawn by the landscape may not be too far off the mark. Available food and shelter, especially during post-glacial pluvial periods, was also a draw for the earliest civilizations. The vastness of the landscape was an attraction to the military but they had little use for the volcanic field and associated features until its potential, energy-producing value was pointed out in the 1970s when all Americans, including most politicians, knew that clean, renewable energy and energy independence were worthwhile pursuits. Decades later, many current American politicians no longer know this.

Civilizations often discount if not purposefully destroy traces of prior civilizations. Fortunately, this is not the case in the Coso Range. The rock art of the Coso Range is well known among local Native Americans and archeological communities.  But this work, much like the obscurity of the Coso Range along CA Rte. 395, is little known elsewhere. As it turns out, the Navy base at China Lake is off-limits to visitors. Consequently, much of the culturally-rich ground within the Coso Range, especially in and around the Coso volcanic field, remains untouched and has therefore been preserved since at least 1940s when the base was created. While some may not care for the existence of large military bases, an ironic aspect of their presence is that the land they maintain is cleaner and better preserved than most other public and private lands in the western U.S. outside of State and National Parks.  They maintain a minimal footprint and do what is necessary to clean up after themselves. Similarly, while production from the geothermal field has modified fluid levels and pressures within this active hydrothermal system, the heat source, the fracture networks and the surface hydrothermal manifestations still exist and will be there long after the military and any geothermal operations have moved on. Local tribes are the only people still allowed into the sacred Coso Hot Springs which they visit periodically for spiritual and religious practices.

Do civilizations that occupied the same obscure piece of ground have anything else in common? Would a comparison of these civilization be instructive or offer any value? These indigenous peoples carved rock art with rudimentary tools.  We can access all human knowledge on a phone.  They thrived for thousands of years and were governed by shamans.  Many leaders of our highly educated, post-WWII civilization are putting all living matter on the planet in grave danger today by ignoring science (and logic and reason and…) to put a few dollars in their pockets. Maybe civilization is not the best term for one of these groups. 

We know little about these ancient cultures, how they interacted and treated one another, and even whether or not they were bellicose and waged war. But we do know such things about ourselves.  A deeper inspection of past civilizations may not teach us how to thrive in and honor the same place for 10,000 years.  But it may help us make it to tomorrow.  That would be a big step. There is much to learn.

Raising the recognition of geothermal energy means gaining public acceptance so it becomes directly associated with other renewable energies like wind and solar. When a leading politician stands up to give an address, we need to hear the word “geothermal” along with the ubiquitous mentions of solar and wind.  Geothermal energy can no longer be overlooked by the country’s leadership.  It needs to be a vibrant part of the future energy mix as we head towards 100% renewable and clean energy. To grow our geothermal industry, we need that upward pressure of public opinion on our leaders. Gaining greater public recognition needs to be a long-term effort with lasting cultural changes within our geothermal community.

We need to change how the public perceives us, as well.  To do that we need to change how we portray ourselves outside of our community. This change has to be now. The recognition of climate change around the world and the policies needed to address it are on the cusp of being the norm everywhere. Those who do not believe in climate change and have argued against it are under increasing pressure from the masses that do.  That debate is over!  Borrowing words from a famous British naturalist, David Attenborough, “As we all know, the world is in trouble! Continents are on fire, glaciers are melting, coral reefs are dying, fish are disappearing from our oceans, and the list goes on and on. But we know what to do about it.”

It is the policies of clean and renewable energy that will help drive the popularity of the geothermal industry across its many different incarnations of power, direct use and ground source heat pumps. We need to change our messaging culture from being introverted and technology focused to being extroverted and people focused.

These are exciting times for our organization as we embrace change and evolve into a new non-profit, professional and trade association for geothermal energy. By doing so, we stay relevant and effective for our membership, sponsors and supporters in the geothermal industry and community in the USA and abroad, as well as broadening our reach into geothermal heating and cooling along with our traditional focus on electricity generation.

The new organization will continue the heritage of the past 50 years, connecting with local people and companies on the ground in our industry, bringing people together in research, industry and government, and collaborating with partner organizations, thought leaders and decision makers around the globe. Built on top of this, we will be developing the sharp and modern public relations that reaches out across society to help promote awareness of geothermal energy: from the general public and school children, through to decision makers at the highest levels.

It has long been recognized by the GRC Board of Directors and leadership that the geothermal industry and the GRC could be more effective on the public relations front. In 2018, the Board published a draft outreach report. The Board concluded that the highest priority strategic goal was to increase the importance of geothermal in meeting energy demands and that this required outreach to enable social acceptance.

The outreach report provides a framework for our marketing and communications. Also in 2018, I was hired as the new Executive Director.  A focus of mine was to help GRC implement its vision and strategy.  I have been supported every step of the way by staff, dedicated volunteers and a Board that welcomes those changes.

In February 2019, the Board approved the use of our Foundation funds for a marketing project. Although GRC has been accumulating foundation investments for almost 50 years, this was the first large-scale use of those funds for implementing necessary changes in the best interests of our membership and the entire industry. The ensuing marketing project focusses on a geothermal development campaign for the whole community. Through effective and stronger marketing, Geothermal Rising will more successfully champion geothermal energy to become mainstream.  We hope to bring geothermal into the public conscience at a level with other energy and energy saving sources.  Our society needs geothermal to transition more fully to clean and renewable energy.

In early 2020, GRC hired Taoti Creative, a talented marketing group based in Washington D.C., to lead GRC’s re-branding efforts, develop our new website, and plan a geothermal marketing campaign for our organization, as well as our industry. Taoti’s first task was to assess how the geothermal industry and GRC is accepted outside the geothermal community.

As part of this assessment, Taoti also took a hard look at our name.  As part of the 2018 GRC-GEA consolidation, the GRC and GEA Boards of Directors agreed that a new name for our organization should be considered.  A new name might better characterize who we are to our membership and to the public. After a survey of Directors, staff and members from our GRC community, Taoti concluded that while “Geothermal Resources Council” worked for this organization over the last 50 years, it may not best represent who we are and what we hope to become going forward.  Questions and comments that we received during this process included the following: “What is a council? What resources are we referring to in our name?  Those in the ground, our people…what? Another common comment was that many members associate “GRC” only with the Annual Meeting and were unaware that there is an organization driving all of this.  “See you next year at GRC” is a common refrain among many of our members.

To make us better understood and to help gain a broader acceptance by our members and the public, we need to change both our name and our branding. Consider for a moment some strong names like Nike, Coca-Cola, or Tesla. Branding is not just about a logo and a name.  It encapsulates the look and feel, the ethos, the essence and personality of an organization. As GRC is synonymous with the industry, then to be successful we also need to re-brand the industry to achieve our vision of raising the recognition and acceptance of geothermal energy across society. GRC is the oldest and largest professional and geothermal trade association. We want it to speak for the geothermal community in a modern movement that champions geothermal energy as the future of clean and renewable energy worldwide. I believe that was the aim of the founders of our organization 50 years ago. We intend to help revitalize GRC and our industry through this aggressive re-branding and marketing campaign and honor the intentions of our founders.

We are changing our organization’s name and our branding, and how we are perceived by the public outside our community. We want to stay relevant to our members and community by shifting into public relations on behalf of both GRC and our industry. It is time to rise above being understood by only scientists and engineers and to become mainstream. Our new name needs position, function and personality. We need to convey that we are the authority and the experts, that we are an association and an influencer, and that we are aspirational, positive, and powerful. A strong new name needs to be different, it needs to resonate, and it needs to be relatable for our members and public alike.

After brainstorming with select Board members and thought leaders and then discussing this with leading industry experts, Taoti presented a new name for Board review and approval. In their presentation, they indicated that this new name must be accompanied by relevant messaging. The name and the messaging should be aspirational and optimistic. It cannot be overly descriptive or technical and should appeal to the masses and not just to those in the industry. Our members told us they desire emphasis on community and to be more engaging.

Transforming our industry’s public image also needs to go together with market opportunities, policy changes, and technical innovation to expand our use over the next decades. In the eyes of the public, we need to rise to the challenge of geothermal anywhere and anytime by being a worldwide industry. We need to present new and scalable technologies for power generation like Engineered Geothermal Systems and closed borehole loops, and illustrate the benefits of expanded electricity power generation and direct use for communities and industry.  We need to show that using the near subsurface for heating and cooling our homes and businesses everywhere can significantly reduce people’s electricity demands.

GRC concluded that our messaging must resonate with the public by being built around a goal of effectively utilizing the planet’s resources in order to save the planet. Our message must be positive, aspirational, showing action and potential; lifting geothermal from the depths like we raise heat from the depths. As a community we must inspire people to join us in using the Earth to save the Earth. We must become Geothermal Rising.

This new branding is a dramatic change to the perception of geothermal energy and its oldest organization, but Geothermal Rising is about embracing change. Our new association, speaking with one voice for the geothermal industry, is relevant today as we enter a renaissance period. Finally, Geothermal Rising retains our greatest commodity and brand recognition; in 2021, our annual meeting and industry exhibition will be in San Diego, October 3rd to 6th, and will be the new Geothermal Rising Conference. Looking forward to seeing you at the GRC!

Geothermal Rising Brand Launch, Opening Session, GRC Virtual Annual Meeting & Expo, October 2020

https://geothermalrisingvideolibrary.vhx.tv/browse