Sonoma Clean Power held a GeoZone Town Hall on July 25 at their Customer Center in downtown Santa Rosa. SCP, a not-for-profit company, provides sources of clean energy to Sonoma and Mendocino counties. That clean energy is transmitted to customers via PG&E.
There was a packed house for this event, including congressional staffers, and council and board members from local governments. SCP CEO Geof Syphers spoke about plans to explore new geothermal opportunities locally in a large area in the eastern parts of Sonoma and Mendocino counties, called the GeoZone. The goal is to eventually produce 600 Megawatts of new geothermal energy locally.
There is already an existing geothermal facility at the Calpine Geysers site. There is room for more drilling, and new technologies have emerged since the Calpine site was built. The new technologies do not require rock that is permeable by water, as is found at the Geysers. Hot rock close to the surface will suffice.
Miles Horton, SCP’s Legislative Policy & Community Engagement Manager, presented slides showing that California still relies on natural gas plants in Los Angeles to provide power in the winter and at night when solar is not available. The plants are mostly located in low income areas, causing pollution and contributing to high rates of asthma. Natural gas is found by fracking, a technology that is proven to pollute the water table. The gas plants are very expensive to operate, and the state needs a green method to get power at night. The demand for electricity is growing.
California has a mission to transition to 100% clean energy by 2045. This will have to be done using a variety of methods. Solar and wind power alone will not provide enough electricity for the state, and more battery storage is needed. Geothermal energy comes from super hot rocks under the earth. When those rocks mix with water, it creates steam that powers a turbine and a generator to produce energy. Then the water is cooled and returned underground via an injection well.
Horton said, “California is the Saudi Arabia of geothermal energy,” because we have so much hot rock underground. It can operate 24-7, and does not rely on the sun shining or the wind blowing. If geothermal technology is widely developed, it could cut 25% of the cost of generating energy on the Western grid, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
There are three companies partnering with SCP to explore the GeoZone. Eavor, a private company headquartered in Calgary, Canada, plans to pilot a new closed-loop system to extract geothermal power. Chevron New Energies will negotiate a grant award from the U.S. Department of Energy for early-stage GeoZone exploration. CYRQ Energy is another private company interested in building an energy storage facility near the Calpine plant.
Three panelists spoke to the audience and took questions: Melanie Bagby, Cloverdale City Council Member; Kevin Jones, PhD, Manager and Strategic Lead for the U.S. Department of Energy Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) Project; and Mikhael Skvarla, Climate Change Project Manager for California Council on Environment and Economic Balance.
Bagby is committed to providing clean energy, and jobs associated with that, to her constituents. Jones is a former Exxon employee, now working for the DOE, who brings oil and gas engineering skills to the field of geothermal energy. Skvarla has extensive experience working on government energy policies.
Skvarla said, “We have 20 years to undo 150 years of industrialization.” Currently, there is a demand overload. “California needs about 7 [gigawatts] of new renewable energy each year to achieve the climate goals of 2045. For context, the most we’ve ever built is 2.5. To scale to achieve carbon neutrality across the system, we’ve got to ramp it up. . . .” Skvarla called this a “construction project on the scale of the New Deal, just in California.” In the next 20 years, California will need to pull together various sources of clean energy. Solar can only provide about 35% of what is needed.
In addition to providing power, developing the local GeoZone will provide blue-collar jobs with wages that can support a family, much of which will be reinvested back into the community. This seems to be a job-creating initiative in addition to providing clean energy. “You are training the workforce of the future by having apprentices on-site,” said Szkvarla.
There is currently not enough electric power in California to bring every large new project online in a timely manner, creating backups. Artificial Intelligence is a new technology that will demand a huge amount of electricity to run the computers that support it. SCP Director of Planning and Analytics Ryan Tracey said that transmission technology needs to improve, “Transmission is the number one bottleneck. The state can’t build it fast enough.”
Skvarla spoke about the various types of clean energy. Solar and wind power will not provide enough energy to meet California’s demand. Hydroelectric power cannot be counted on, as California is removing some dams that generate hydropower. Hydrogen is another clean energy technology being developed. Different clean technologies will need to be used together to meet California’s need for the 7 Gigs a year of new clean energy.
Jones said, “Geothermal can add clean power to the grid at a cost competitive price. . . .We need to have demonstration projects. We need to understand what works, and why.” The test project here can move the country as a whole.
What if the test projects are unsuccessful? That would result in continued use of fossil fuel and continued climate warming. “You’ve got this tremendous need for clean power, you also have this tremendous geothermal resource you’re not taking advantage of,” said Jones.
Some are mistrustful of SCP’s collaboration with Chevron New Energies. Jones said he was recruited by the oil and gas industry after college, and that many engineers at oil and gas companies want to work on renewable energy projects. “If given the opportunity to use their skills and their experience to bring more renewable energy onto the grid, they will absolutely do that. . . . If everything works the way we hope it does, we can move away from fossil fuels really quickly.” He explained that the Department of Energy acts almost like a tech company because it invests in new technology, and funds research and development to move away from fossil fuels.
How do we ensure that geothermal won’t replicate the mistakes made by oil and gas fracking? Geothermal drilling does not mix oil and gas into the water supply. The DOE’s goal is to make sure that the water being returned underground from geothermal drilling is clean enough to drink.
Syphers said that with oil and gas drilling for hydrocarbons, you are polluting the groundwater and the surface, as well as burning fuel. In geothermal drilling “You are expressly trying to avoid hydrocarbons, because that actually fouls the whole system. If you hit hydrocarbons, you have failed in geothermal.” The GeoZone drilling is anticipated to be 8,000 to 10,000 feet deep, where rock temperatures are 400 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
Bagby said, “It’s time for us to lead, and we have the resources to do it.” The GeoZones test project in Sonoma County can provide an opportunity for Sonoma and Mendocino Counties to lead the country in adopting geothermal energy.