Thursday, 18 February

Geothermal in Pop Culture

Two pop icons have put support behind geothermal energy projects in the last week in two different ways. You know that Google has had a geothermal program for quite sometime. The guy leading this program, Charles Baron, is reported to give an impassioned speech in San Francisco last week talking about the projects receiving Google support. Google has invested in geothermal start-ups Altarock Energy and Potter Drilling. It also has given a grant to Southern Methodist University's geothermal lab for geothermal resource mapping, in what seems an obvious synergy with Google Earth. Much of today's geothermal data mapping is based on data collected in the 1970s. Since then, millions of more data points have been collected but have not been aggregated and analyzed. The Google grant supports SMU in aggregating data for the most under-sampled regions of the U.S. and in developing new methodologies for estimating geothermal resources.

The other pop icon that put its support behind geothermal was the Irish rock band U2, albeit in a more modest way. It is reported that U2 fans are asked to purchase carbon certificates offsetting the emissions they generate when traveling to the band’s shows. This will probably generate close to $450,000 and it will be used to support zero-emission power projects, one of which apparently is the Dora-1 geothermal plant in Turkey.

Click here for the rest of the blog