On the slopes of an Oregon volcano, engineers are building the hottest geothermal power plant on Earth.
The plant will tap into the infernal energy of Newberry Volcano, “one of the largest and most hazardous active volcanoes in the United States,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It has already reached temperatures of 629 degrees Fahrenheit, making it one of the hottest geothermal sites in the world, and next year it will start selling electricity to nearby homes and businesses.
But the start-up behind the project, Mazama Energy, wants to crank the temperature even higher - north of 750 degrees - and become the first to make electricity from what industry insiders call “superhot rock.”
Enthusiasts say that could usher in a new era of geothermal power, transforming the always-on clean energy source from a minor player to a major force in the world’s electricity systems.
“Geothermal has been mostly inconsequential,” said Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist and one of Mazama Energy’s biggest financial backers. “To do consequential geothermal that matters at the scale of tens or hundreds of gigawatts for the country, and many times that globally, you really need to solve these high temperatures.”
Today, geothermal produces less than 1 percent of the world’s electricity. But tapping into superhot rock, along with other technological advances, could boost that share to 8 percent by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Geothermal using superhot temperatures could theoretically generate 150 times more electricity than the world uses, according to the IEA.
Once, a very long time ago, pre-kids, Georgia and I did a road trip around Eastern Oregon, and stopped for a day at Mt. Newberry. It's really a caldera remaining from a very large eruption 75,000 years ago, larger than the one that formed Crater Lake out of Mt. Mazama. It's hard to even visualize the size of the caldera when you're inside the caldera, which hold not one, but two lakes, East Lake and Paulina Lake. We rented a rowboat, and rowed around one of the lakes, East Lake, IIRC. Another neat feature is a giant flow of obsidian. I hadn't specifically heard it was considered an active volcano, but anything volcanic in the Cascades or nearby, has to be considered as possibly active.
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