News
Apr 03, 2009National Post: “The Shock Doctrine - Disaster environmentalism in action”
An alternative viewpoint on renewable energy from National Post columnist David Frum. Frum writes:
Wind, solar, and geothermal, by contrast, are the most expensive alternatives to coal. A kilowatt of power from such renewables typically costs about ten times as much as a kilowatt from coal — and more than six times as much as a kilowatt from nuclear or hydropower.
To read David Frum’s full article: Click here.
CanGEA believes that geothermal energy was misrepresented by this article, and issued a letter of response which can be read here.
CanGEA supports that geothermal power does not cost more to produce than coal. Investigations through Scientific American and other organizations have come to this conclusion. CanGEA continues to confront issues of awareness to earn geothermal its rightful place in Canada’s renewable energy future.
Apr 03, 2009
Excess Government Money for Carbon Capture Could Be Used to Develop Geothermal in Alberta
You can view the original article “Oilsands opts out of carbon capture” by clicking here
Why do we insist on carbon capture when we could have carbon prevention at a lower price?
The energy industry has passed a significant vote of non-confidence against carbon capture and sequestration this week, refusing to accept their share of $2 billion dollars to advance the technology in Alberta’s oil sands. Now the focus turns to the other salient options to curtail Alberta’s unsettling carbon footprint at a utility scale.
Nuclear power generation is Alberta’s next potential solution in queue. However, we should be reminded that nuclear power is not a mitigation of pollution as much as it is accepting pollution in a deferred and ostensibly palatable form. Bringing nuclear into question also engages additional opposition from the environmental front, where carbon capture and sequestration, in principle, did not offer considerable cause for concern.
For a minute fraction of the cost that Alberta is willing to assume for CCS technology, there is a third option the government can explore for reductions in CO2 emissions. This time we venture even deeper underground to harness geothermal energy, the natural source of heat that leaks through Earth’s crust. By conservative estimates, Alberta can produce 500 Megawatts of geothermal electricity which has a levelized cost competitive with coal. Harnessing this zero-emission resource could annually offset 2.7 Megatonnes of CO2 emissions, and this figure will rise as geothermal technologies improve. For less than 1 percent of what the government is offering to CCS, Alberta could institute a pilot program to co-produce petroleum alongside geothermal power.
In these times we need to make prudent choices about energy especially in view of our environmental and economic peril. If Alberta produces even a fraction of our zero-emissions geothermal power at a cost competitive with coal, it is certainly worthwhile to invest government money to support Albertan geothermal power technologies. We have to confront the emissions crisis from all practical angles, and when it comes to geothermal power, we have to look deeper than originally thought.
