It is mainly hydro. However in Germanys case it is meant to provide heating for buildings and not electricity. There are some cool things you can do with it, when available. The biggest one is aquifere heat storage, so using ground water deep enough to have geothermal heat, to store large amounts of hot water. Like large enough amounts to heat a city for a year. Hence it is a great technology to use together with other renewable power sources.
Building heating is usually the thing that a lot of people forget about when it comes to energy. If you have 45 cents a kilowatt hour electricity you’re not going to be heating your home with electricity unless you’re a Rockefeller. In a lot of cases, building heating causes more emissions than transportation. So if you can help people heat their homes or help businesses or factories heat their buildings using a carbon neutral energy source, that can be more impactful than taking every car off the road.
Isn’t Iceland 100% geothermal? I have a soft spot for technologies that have actually displaced fossil fuels in significant geographical areas.
It is mainly hydro. However in Germanys case it is meant to provide heating for buildings and not electricity. There are some cool things you can do with it, when available. The biggest one is aquifere heat storage, so using ground water deep enough to have geothermal heat, to store large amounts of hot water. Like large enough amounts to heat a city for a year. Hence it is a great technology to use together with other renewable power sources.
Building heating is usually the thing that a lot of people forget about when it comes to energy. If you have 45 cents a kilowatt hour electricity you’re not going to be heating your home with electricity unless you’re a Rockefeller. In a lot of cases, building heating causes more emissions than transportation. So if you can help people heat their homes or help businesses or factories heat their buildings using a carbon neutral energy source, that can be more impactful than taking every car off the road.