While wind and solar get the media attention of a sexy starlet, good old geothermal power is treated like an aging character actor.

But geothermal energy is, in fact, sizzling hot these days. Big-time investors from Warren Buffet to Goldman Sachs to Morgan Stanley to Google have begun investing:

In 2007, private equity firms invested more than $400 million in geothermal energy, which is derived from hot water under the Earth’s surface and can be used for space heating or generating electricity

Why the interest in a form of energy that President Bush repeatedly tried to zero out of the Department of Energy Budget? One reason is the soaring cost of conventional power, like coal and nuclear. Another is the growing awareness of just how much is zero-carbon electricity will need in coming decades.

But perhaps most important for this reemerging technology, in the 2005 energy bill, Congress finally extended the renewable energy tax credit to geothermal “which at 2 cents per kilowatt hour for the first ten years, can account for a third of the cost of a project” — and which will expire in December unless Congress gets its act together (see here)!

The U.S. currently has 3 gigaWatts (3000 megaWatts) of geothermal, one third of the world’s capacity, generating $1.8 billion electricity sales. What is the ultimate potential?

The US Geological Survey estimates the US could generate 150,000 megawatts.

A major 2007 study by MIT on Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) found that it could be a provider of substantial baseload (24/7) power:

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The coal-industry front group American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) has launched a major lobbying campaign against the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (S. 2191). ACCCE claims it is opposed to Lieberman-Warner because it “does not adequately embrace” their “principles” and raises “just too many unanswered questions.”

Principles: ACCCE’s 12 principles for federal legislation boil down to demands that they be allowed to construct new, uncontrolled coal-fired power plants until taxpayers pony up unlimited amounts of money for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. That’s not a statement of principles — it’s a ransom note.

Lieberman-Warner, named for its two co-sponsors Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Warner (R-VA), would allow the United States to join the rest of the world in combatting climate change by setting a firm limit on carbon emissions while providing support to low-income families. However, the bill also makes significant concessions to polluters, particularly the coal industry:

–The bill calls for reductions in greenhouse emissions that are insufficient to avoid climate catastrophe.
–The bill gives a windfall of emissions permits to polluters, instead of auctioning all permits.
–The bill promises over $300 billion directly to coal polluters.

Strangely, that isn’t enough for ACCCE.

Questions: ACCCE’s questions boil down to pro-coal talking points, recycled attacks on “foreign fuels,” and vague fears about “unnecessarily” increased costs that have been well debunked.

Listen to the Pennsylvania radio spot:

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What is the point of no return for the climate — the level of CO2 concentrations beyond which catastrophic outcomes are virtually unstoppable?

No one knows for sure, but my vote goes for the point at which we start to lose a substantial fraction of the tundra’s carbon to the atmosphere — substantial being 0.1% per year! As we saw in Part 1, frozen away in the permafrost is more carbon than the atmosphere currently contains (and much of that is in the form of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide).

What is the point of no return for the tundra? A major 2005 study (subs. req’d) led by NCAR climate researcher David Lawrence, found that virtually the entire top 11 feet of permafrost around the globe could disappear by the end of this century.

Using the first “fully interactive climate system model” applied to study permafrost, the researchers found that if we tried to stabilize CO2 concentrations in the air at 550 ppm, permafrost would plummet from over 4 million square miles today to 1.5 million. If concentrations hit 850 ppm in 2100, permafrost would shrink to just 800,000 square miles.

While these projections were done with one of the world’s most sophisticated climate system models, the calculations do not include the feedback effect of the released carbon from the permafrost. That is to say, the CO2 concentrations in the model rise only as a result of direct emissions from humans, with no extra emissions counted from soils or tundra. Thus they are conservative numbers–or overestimates–of how much CO2 concentrations have to rise to trigger irreversible melting.

In short, those would-be points of atmospheric stabilization, 550 ppm or 850 ppm, aren’t stable at all — they are past the point of no return. We must stay well below 450 ppm to save the tundra and hence the climate.

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