ICE Mulls Geothermal Energy

Nothing in electricity generation technology is as attractive to a small, seismically-active country seeking sustainable power than the compact geothermal station such as exist at the 165.5 megawatt Miravalles plant that produces 13% of the country’s electricity.

This is why earlier this year, the national power company ICE entered into technical discussions with the U.S. company, GTherm for a pilot project 12 megawatt generator. GTherm’s newer technology promises to provide an answer to the biggest drawbacks to using the earth’s heat to generate power.

Essentially, the geothermal power plant is simply steam power by tapping the earth’s magma layer to heat water at the plant. But the older technology has a serious defect: It uses a lot of water and plentiful water and volcanoes do not often go hand-in-hand.

But GTherm’s development is a closed system, recycling most of the same water, a technique that the company calls by the cumbersome name, Single Well Engineered Geothermal System (SWEGS).

Now that indigenous groups have filed a court suit against ICE for flooding some of their native lands with the Diques hydroelectric dam under construction, this may be the way for ICE to go, a technology that is faster to build and takes less land.