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It's a good point, but there are many grid experts who argue that smaller, distributed generation is more robust and reliable than larger, 500MW+ plants. Outsid
by rfrey 6y ago
It's a good point, but there are many grid experts who argue that smaller, distributed generation is more robust and reliable than larger, 500MW+ plants. Outside a few areas, most geothermal plants are quite small: I doubt we'll ever see one over 15MW in Canada, for example.
A 7MW plant doesn't sound like much, but if you're cookie-cuttering 9 of them along a line, costs come way down since they're all essentially identical. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and if we did all the larger (over 15000hp) natural gas compressor stations in the US and Canada, we'd be looking at something like 42TWh per year of generation. That compares to 68 TWh for all deployed utility solar (2018 tho). That's just gas compressor stations, which are about 15% of the industrial heat generated in the US.