The U.S. Navy is getting serious about solar energy and has just awarded five contracts worth up to $100 million for the design, installation and management of solar arrays at Navy and Marine Corps facilities in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah. This is by no means the first foray into solar power for the Navy, which was installing solar arrays at least as far back as 2002 and recently installed a solar roof at Pearl Harbor, but it does indicate a significant ramping up in terms of pace and scale.

With our military adopting safe, renewable solar power hand over fist, it will be that much harder on the fossil fuel industry to get the American public to continue accepting coal, oil, and gas resources that are proving to be more dangerous and unreliable than the U.S. can tolerate.  The latest disasters – a new oil spill in coastal Louisiana and an oil spill in Michigan that could be among the worst ever for the Midwest – are just further proof that it’s time to let go of the past and embrace the future.

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Recovered energy generation produces electricity from heat that would otherwise be thrown away. This “geothermal” energy technology would lower carbon emissions on oil fields and from cement makers, two of the three major carbon emitters to be covered by CEJAPA energy legislation. The potential is for 5,000 MW of electricity to be harvested, and CO2 reduced; just from oil drilling operations in this country.

I contacted Jim Nations at the Rocky Mountain Oilfield Testing Center, who was kind enough to give me some additional details on the tests that I wrote about last week. The DOE testing is being carried out on a 10,000 acre oil field with over 1,000 well bores to extract geothermal energy from the byproduct of oil drilling (hot water), using a 250 KW  Ormat recovered energy generator unit (pictured above).

The power system comprises a commercial standard design Ormat Organic Rankine Cycle power plant. The binary power unit uses produced hot water as the heating fluid for a heat exchanger in the Ormat Energy Converter, where a secondary working fluid, an organic fluid with a low boiling point, is vaporized. That vapor is then used to spin a turbine coupled to a generator to produce electricity.

Jim’s answers, over the jump:

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Raser Technologies announced this week that it has completed construction of a plant on top of one of the United States’ largest geothermal hotbeds to be discovered in over 25 years—so large that Raser believes it could power one third of all homes in Utah.

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A study released last week from the U.S. Geological Survey reports that geothermal power production could significantly add to electric power generating capacity within the United States.

The first national geothermal assessment done in 30 years by a governmental agency, the report indicates that the U.S. has “identified conventional” sources of geothermal systems that, if fully developed, are capable of generating 9,057 megawatts-electric (MWe). An additional 30,033 MWe of potential power generation is available from “conventional undiscovered” geothermal sources, and 517,800 MWe from unconventional Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) or high temperature, low-permeability resources.

By developing the already known conventional sources, the reports says, geothermal electric power production could expand 260%, adding 6,500MWe to the total of slightly more than 2,500 MWe currently generated.

We’ve heard a lot about drilling for oil offshore and in Alaska as a means to increase our domestic sources of energy, but the clamor for “drill now” has overshadowed the significant contribution geothermal can contribute to our domestic “energy portfolio”.

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College students are demanding sustainability efforts in their schools, and now universities are stepping up to the plate. This past Tuesday, the Oregon Institute of Technology outlined a plan to build a $7.6 million geothermal power plant on campus. The plant will become the sole power source for the school in a few years, making Oregon Tech the only university to be powered completely by geothermal energy.

Since Klamath Falls, the home of Oregon Tech, sits near a fault line, heat and energy can be easily taken out of the earth.

And Oregon Tech isn’t the only institution to take advantage of the abundant geothermal energy in the area.

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