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Geothermal Energy Is Heat Energy Coming From The Earth

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1. Introduction
Geothermal energy is heat energy coming from the Earth. Geothermal energy is relatively cost effective, reliable, and friendly to the environment, but is limited to some specific areas. Recent technology development has greatly expanded the range and size of geothermal energy resources. Now the geothermal energy can be also used for applications such as home heating, which add use potential for the resource. Although, tapping geothermal energy will release some gas pollution which are originally trapped deep inside the earth, these emissions are much lower than those of fossil fuels. Therefore, geothermal energy is a kind of potential energy and may help to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions of the earth.
California, with its location on the Pacific "Ring of Fire," has great potential of geothermal energy, which can easily meet the consumption of electricity for 100,000 residents. According to EIA [1], the monthly average consumption per person is 557kWh, we can get,
Total Capacity = (557 ×12 kWh/year×100,000)/(365 ×24 ×0.92h/year) = 83 MW
Therefore, our geothermal power plant capacity is 83MW.
2. Resource Definition
2.1 Resource Type
The heat of earth provide us the geothermal energy. The heat can exist in the shallow ground, as well as hot water or hot rocks a few miles away from the earth’s surface. To go deeper, there will be extremely hot magma [2]. Usually, volcanic activity and seismic effects can produce geothermal energy [3].
There
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