GeoVision Analysis Supporting Task Force Report: Thermal Applications-Quantifying Technical, Economic, and Market Potential of Geothermal District Heating Systems in the United States

Abstract

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2021 U.S. Geothermal Power Production and District Heating Market Report

“…The GDH market in the United States is mostly undeveloped. Direct-use geothermal only provides 0.1% of the current total U.S. thermal demand (McCabe et al 2019). This is likely due to a combination of low natural gas prices, the lack of government and incentive programs that would offset upfront GDH installation costs, and a lack of local and regional stakeholder awareness and support.…”

“…From a technical and economic resource perspective, there is vast potential to rapidly deploy GDH in many parts of the United States (Mullane et al 2016;McCabe et al 2019). However, the U.S. GDH sector has been relatively stagnant since the 1980s, with only four new installations over the past two decades.…”

“…explored the potential role of GDH systems in meeting current and future energy demands in the contiguous United States(McCabe et al 2019). The Thermal Task Force developed a Distributed Geothermal Market Demand Model (dGeo) to simulate the technical, economic, and market potential for deployment of GDH systems in the residential and commercial sectors through 2050.…”

GeoVision Analysis Supporting Task Force Report: Impacts-The Employment Opportunities, Water Impacts, Emission Reductions, and Air Quality Improvements of Achieving High Penetrations of Geothermal Power in the United States

“…The primary modeling tools used in this analysis are the Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS [Short et al 2011]) model for the electric sector and the Distributed Geothermal Market Demand Model (dGeo) for the GHP sector. Further details about the scenarios and the modeling tools used to develop the scenarios can be found in Gleason et al (2017), Sigrin et al (2016), Eurek et al (2016), McCabe et al (2019), Liu et al (2019), Young et al (2019), Augustine et al (2019), andDoughty et al (2018). The rest of this report is structured by benefit category (i.e., jobs, water, air pollution, GHG), with each section including introductory and methodological materials along with results.…”

“…Therefore, instead of estimating the impacts of a full expansion scenario, we quantify the impacts of a limited number of representative systems and use those results to qualitatively describe the impacts of larger direct-use expansion. We choose representative systems from two direct-use economic potential scenarios, a BAU scenario and a TI scenario which uses the same cost and technology improvement assumptions for developing the direct-use reservoir as the electricity sector TI scenario (see McCabe et al [2019] for direct-use scenario details).…”