U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced up to $338 million in Recovery Act funding for the exploration and development of new geothermal fields and research into advanced geothermal technologies.  These grants will support 123 projects in 39 states, with recipients including private industry, academic institutions, tribal entities, local governments, and DOE’s National Laboratories.  The grants will be matched more than one-for-one with an additional $353 million in private and non-Federal cost-share funds.

In an effort to cut their carbon footprints, a handful of universities around the country are turning to ground-source heat exchangers and geothermal heating — sometimes with the help of federal financing.

Ball State University in Indiana expects to be able to eliminate a coal plant by adding heat pump capabilities. The system, which will take 5 to 10 years to finish, involves drilling holes 450 feet deep in several areas, using the earth’s natural heat to run its heating and cooling more efficiently, according to a blog post by Robert Koester, a professor of architecture at the university.

The university will need extra electricity to run the facility, Mr. Koester writes, but that will be at least partly offset by efforts to buy more solar and wind power.

Other schools turning to the technology include Hampton University in Virginia, Indiana Tech, and Montana Tech.

Garden Hills Elementary School has brighter hallways and cooler classrooms this fall, and the distinction of being the Champaign school district’s “first green school.” On Tuesday, the school celebrated the completion of a geothermal system that provides a more efficient way to heat and cool the building.

Construction of the country’s largest geothermal heating and cooling system is set to begin at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday, May 9. U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) will ceremonially control the drilling machine that will drive the first of up to 4,000 boreholes required by the project.

Within a decade, the university expects to heat and cool via geothermal means more than 40 buildings on its 660-acre campus, realizing significant annual energy savings and cutting carbon emissions by approximately 80,000 tons per year.

Sue Butler decided it was time to cut the cord on fossil fuels. So when her aging gas furnace needed replacing, she turned to the Earth for a solution.

She installed a geothermal system–also called a ground-source heat pump, a water-source heat pump, or geo-exchange system–which recently started heating and cooling her Cambridge, Mass. home. Butler said she was motivated by environmental reasons and concerns over carbon monoxide from burning natural gas.

“It’s not that much more expensive and I could manage it. And it means no more combustion and it gets the building off of carbon, which is urgent,” she said.

Ground-source heat pumps have been around for decades but every year seem to attract more homeowners and organizations who are looking for alternatives to traditional space heating and cooling. They can hook into existing forced hot air and hot water systems but not steam heat.

Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the Internet search giant, has announced $10.7 million in grants to three organizations working to advance Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) energy technology.

While the traditional geothermal approach relies on finding naturally occurring pockets of steam and hot water, EGS expands the potential of geothermal energy by replicating these conditions, fracturing hot rock, circulating water through the system, and using the resulting steam to produce electricity in a conventional turbine. A recent MIT report on EGS estimates that just 2 percent of the geothermal heat located in the continental United States at a depth between three and ten kilometers — within the range of current drilling technology — is the equivalent of more than 2,500 times the country’s total annual energy use.

The search engine’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, is investing $10.25 million in a pair of companies working on “enhanced geothermal systems” — basically running water through hot rocks to get steam for electricity.

It’s the latest push in Google’s plan to develop renewable energy that’s cheaper than coal, and which has already led to $30 million in wind and solar investments.

When a historic seminary in the heart of Manhattan went searching for a way to cut its energy costs in an environmentally friendly way, it didn’t turn to the heavens for sun or wind power but sought salvation in an unlikely direction for a religious institution. It looked underground.

Tapping the energy stored in the Earth, the General Theological Seminary, the oldest Episcopal seminary in America, is in the midst of a multiyear effort to construct the largest geothermal project on the East Coast. When completed, 20 wells reaching depths of at least 1,500 feet will supply water to heat and cool the seminary’s 275,000 square feet of space.

The institution — built on land donated by Clement Clark Moore, who wrote “The Night Before Christmas” — is hardly alone in seeing the potential for geothermal power. From large power plants in the West that produce electricity to a hospital in the Chicago suburb of Elgin to homeowners looking to save money on their utility bills, geothermal power is experiencing steady but largely unnoticed growth in America.

“We see Iceland as the world’s laboratory for a decarbonized future,” says Ingibjorg Sólrun Gisladóttir, the country’s foreign minister and former mayor of Reykjavik. Of course, many countries say similar things, but Iceland has a head start, because it’s partly decarbonized already. Some 85 percent of Iceland’s homes are heated with geothermal energy, which also produces 18 percent of the country’s electricity. The rest is emission-free hydroelectric power from the many dams on Iceland’s free-flowing rivers. As much as 72 percent of Iceland’s primary energy is renewable, the highest percentage in the developed world. Coal smoke no longer darkens the skies.

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Engineers will drill into the backyard of the Colorado Governor’s Mansion in two weeks, hoping to find groundwater at a consistent 55 degrees that can be pumped into the house to lower heating and air-conditioning costs.

If the tests find easily accessible water, production will start next spring, and Colorado will be the first state in the nation with a ground-source heating and cooling system in its governor’s residence, said Lance Shepherd, the manager of design and construction programs for the Office of the State Architect.

Officials at California University of Pennsylvania decided that renovating its 40-year-old dormitories was too expensive and tore them down to build new residence halls. The buildings will be heated and cooled through geothermal heat pumps.

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In response to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the U.S. Department of the Interior has issued new rules to encourage geothermal energy development on public lands. The new rules provide competitive leasing and simplified royalty calculations while sharing royalties with county governments.

Toronto Star. Major oil sands companies in Canada have formed an industry-wide consortium— GeoPower in the Oil Sands, or GeoPOS—to explore the use of geothermal energy as a clean alternative to natural gas for oil sands production.

The design originally recommended for the first branch of the Gail Borden Public Library came in under its $4.2 million budget, and the district’s board directed the project’s architect to research the possibility of heating and cooling the west-side facility using geothermal technology.

Mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth’s hard rock crust could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in the future, probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact, concludes a comprehensive new study of the potential for geothermal energy within the United States.

An energy retrofit, which includes a geothermal heat pump, will help Hospital Louis-H. Lafontaine (HLHL) in Montreal become more energy efficient while lowering utility and operational costs and greenhouse gas emissions.

SCHOTT Solar Feels Impact of Silicon Shortage
by Stephen Lacey, RenewableEnergyAccess.com
SCHOTT Solar, Inc. issued a notice to its employees at its solar wafer and module manufacturing plant in Billerica, Massachusetts, that the facility may have to close down because of inadequate supplies of silicon.

Winds of Change Blow Through California Power Grid
by Janis Mara
The whirling blades of 100 giant wind turbines sent a jolt of electricity into California’s power grid as a group gathered in Rio Vista [last week] to dedicate the Shiloh Wind Power Plant.

Turning Kitchen Grease into Biogas
The City of Millbrae recently completed a new facility at its Water Pollution Control Plant that will turn inedible kitchen grease from local restaurants into biogas — generating renewable energy to treat the city’s wastewater. The new system, engineered and installed by Chevron Corporation’s Energy Solutions unit, includes a grease-receiving station and an expanded cogenerator.

California Solar Industry: Stay Informed, Be Involved
With the implementation date for the California Solar Initiative (CSI) approaching on January 1, 2007, it is important for members of the California solar business community to be informed about the impacts the program will have on the industry.

CPUC Proposed REC Decision Delayed
by Stephen Lacey, RenewableEnergyAccess.com
A California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) proposed decision to grant solar renewable energy certificates (SRECs) to utilities was delayed on Tuesday, November 14, because of the overwhelming response from the solar industry against such a decision.

Ontario Renewable Energy SOP Enters Final Phase
The Ontario Power Authority (OPA) is scheduled to begin receiving applications for the Renewable Energy Standard Offer Program (RESOP) on Wednesday, November 22. Prior to the launch of the program, the OPA is releasing a number of documents on its website to help interested parties prepare their applications.

$2.3 M from the DOE Will Fund Hydrogen Research
Proton Energy Systems, Inc., a subsidiary of Distributed Energy Systems Corp., has been awarded a $2.3 million contract for a hydrogen technology research project by the University of Nevada Las Vegas Research Foundation (UNLVRF). The funds enable the company to continue to examine advanced proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysis technology research.

Nordic Bank to Invest in the U.S. Geothermal Energy Market
In a speech at the U.S. Geothermal Development and Finance Workshop in Washington, DC, executive Arni Magnusson, the representative of Glitnir, a leading Nordic specialty bank, outlined the latest trends and opportunities in sustainable energy, specifically within the growing niche market of geothermal energy — in which Glitnir plans to invest and look for opportunities in the U.S.

Mass Storage Key to Future of Renewables
The vanadium-based Flow Battery from VRB Power Systems, Inc. is proving that mass storage for intermittent resources such as wind and solar is achievable, according to the company’s CEO Tim Hennessy.

The recent deepening of two existing injection wells at Raft River, Idaho, by U.S. Geothermal as part of its well-improvement program for the Phase One — a 13-megawatt (MW) geothermal binary cycle power plant now under construction — shows the geothermal resource has extensive potential.

Ten Senators urged the Department of Energy to amend its loan guarantee solicitation to include geothermal energy in a bipartisan letter written in response to recent legislation excluding geothermal from the Strategic Plan’s mix of eligible renewable energy projects.

Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski cut the ribbon Sunday to officially dedicate Alaska’s first geothermal energy plant at Chena Hot Springs. He was joined by Senator Ted Stevens at the resort outside of Fairbanks for the ceremony, along with more than 1,000 people attending the Geothermal Conference and Renewable Energy Fair.

The geothermal system, funded in part through an Energy Department grant, is the first in the world to use a new technology that makes electricity generation possible at lower temperatures, a breakthrough that will make geothermal power plants feasible in a greater number of locations than today’s high-temperature technologies. The total cost of the project, including onsite infrastructure, is $5 million, with 25% from DOE, 25% from United Technologies Corporation, and the rest from Chena and the Alaska Energy Authority.  The Pure Cycle (TM) organic rankine device was initially developed in partnership with the DOE Distributed Energy program to convert waste heat and liquid streams to power to increase system efficiency of distributed generation devices.

The U.S. Department of Interior has proposed new rules to encourage development of geothermal energy on public lands, including simplified royalty calculations and more competitive leasing.

While the rest of us whine about the price of gasoline and home heating oil, some people already have done something about it. Throughout the state there are people who switched to alternative energy sources well before the latest increase in fuel costs. These people have found practical and effective ways to eliminate or reduce their reliance on oil and gasoline, in some cases saving thousands of dollars each year. Here are some of these people and their alternative energy systems.