Renewable Energy Sources: Geothermal and Biomass

In previous post, I shared brief overview about common renewable energy sources, such as solar power, wind power, and hydro power. In this post, I want to continue sharing about other renewable energy sources, which are geothermal, biomass, and energy sources from sea (wave, tidal, and ocean thermal energy conversion).

Geothermal Energy

Geothermal energy is renewable and offer more advantages than other renewable energy sources, such as hydro, wind, bio energy, biomass, and wave energy. It has high degree of availability, low land use, insignificant dependence on weather conditions, and comparatively low visual impact.

Global installed capacity of geothermal power has reached 14.4 GW, with the US as the largest geothermal country so far.

The vast majority of geothermal energy source are located closed to volcanic activity areas.

Geothermal power project are capital-intensive and highly site-sensitive. Global installed costs for geothermal power plants are typically between USD 1870 per kW and USD 5050 per kW. In general costs for binary plants tend to be more higher than direct steam and flash plants [2].

Figure below shows total cost breakdown for the development of two 110 MW flash geothermal power plants in Indonesia, with total installed cost USD 3830/kW [2]. The highest cost is power plant cost, which accounted 42% of total cost.

Biomass Energy

Biomass is one of alternative energy that can ease our dependence on fossil fuels. Biomass is renewable, it can be grown worldwide. There are many potential biomass sources, such as food crops, algae, trees, waste from cities and factories, and methane from landfills.

Biomass can be converted to thermal energy, liquid, solid, or gaseous fuels and other chemical products through various conversion processes.

In general, the most prominent bioenergy technologies are comprised of direct combustion, co-firing, gasification, pyrolysis, anaerobic digestion, and fermentation.

It seems that this topic is quite large. I will continue the post about renewable energy sources from sea in the next post. I hope you get benefit from this post!

References:

[1] Geothermal Power Plants

[2] Geothermal Power Technology Brief

[3] Renewable Biomass Energy

[4] International Renewable Energy Agency