Geothermal energy is a cool way to make electricity using heat from deep inside the Earth.
It’s clean and good for our planet, but it’s often expensive and sometimes stops working for a bit.
Scientists from Penn State University think they’ve found a way to make it work better and keep it going without any breaks.
How does geothermal energy work? Imagine the Earth is like a big, hot potato. People drill deep holes into this “potato” to reach the hot parts.
Then, they pump cold water down these holes. The water gets hot as it moves through cracks in the rocks deep underground. Next, the hot water is pumped back up, and a power plant turns it into electricity.
But here’s the problem: sometimes the water moves too fast through really big cracks and doesn’t get hot enough. When that happens, the power plant doesn’t work well, and it can even stop making electricity for a while.
Professor Arash Dahi Taleghani, one of the smart people working on this, says it’s like the water takes a shortcut.
Because the water moves too fast, it doesn’t get the chance to heat up. That’s not good because then the power plant has to pause or slow down, and that makes geothermal energy more expensive and less reliable than other green energies like wind or solar.
So, what’s the new trick to fix this? The scientists suggest adding special materials or chemicals to the water being pumped down.
These materials can change how they act depending on the temperature. For example, they could slow down the flow of colder water and let the hotter water keep going. This way, the water spends more time getting hot in the Earth’s “oven” and less time taking shortcuts.
What’s the big deal? Well, the scientists did some computer tests and found that their idea could make geothermal energy a lot better. They think it might help get 65% more heat out of the ground over 50 years! Even in places with tricky rock formations, like Arches National Park in Utah, this method could double the amount of heat we can get.
This is super important because we need all the clean energy we can get to fight climate change. If this works, it could make geothermal energy cheaper and more reliable. That means we could use it more and depend less on things like coal and oil that are bad for the Earth.
Professor Taleghani said, “This shows there are still huge amounts of clean energy deep in the Earth that we can use without hurting our planet.”
So, next time someone talks about renewable energy, don’t forget about the Earth’s hot potato. Thanks to some smart science, it could become an even better way to power our lives.
The study was published in the journal Energy.
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Source: Pennsylvania State University.
