Geothermal Heating

Through a joint effort by two agencies of the US Federal Government, the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, a searchable database and collection of technical information about geothermal power is now freely available online as the Geothermal Technologies Legacy Collection.

Even though it's called the "Legacy Collection," that doesn't mean the contents of the research is out of date. It simply means that some of the best work was done in the 1970s when federal monies poured into research and development as a result of the last petroleum crisis.

Since federal geothermal research programs were instituted by the Department of Energy in 1974, there has been about $1.5 billion dollars allocated to investigations of geothermal energy. This is partly why so many schools built in the last 30 years have rudimentary geothermal systems; usually operating at tremendous cost savings compared with similarly designed conventional buildings.

The Legacy database is made up of what were considered the best and most useful papers from that time, according to the federal office that was charged with making the decisions. Over the course of several years the reports were nominated, selected and finally preserved in digital form in a suitable interface that made searching them intuitive and easy.

The project took several years, and as well it should since there were somewhere between 20-80,000 documents to go over. The collection is only concerning itself with federally sponsored research, so private investigations are kept at private foundations such as the Geothermal Energy Association.

Within the database are found reports on all manner of research including case studies, developed experiments that were carried out a quite a few different universities and military records that have been declassified.

All the documents are in *.pdf file format and are freely available for the download by anyone. Many of the documents are technical in nature and may be difficult for the non-engineer to understand, but they certainly do span the planning and inception of the technology from its earliest days. As such, there are some fundamental calculations that remain just as valid today as they did in 1975.

As a service for the public good, the database is a useful companion to anyone looking for a proper journalistic citation to back up system design considerations. By following the case studies found in the Geothermal Technologies Legacy Collection, you can get a real feel for just what does work and what doesn't work very well at all without having to make the same mistake twice.

Geothermal Heating |