It occurs to me that some types of geothermal should be practical in some places. Perhaps those active zones are just not stable enough?
dieselgman
I have been to new Zealand a few times to do Photoshoots. The geothermal in areas there is amazing. You could literally sink a steam well in your own back yard and some people have.
Around the most active area, rotoroua, Geo is huge for heating and spas. I don't think there is a motel in the place that doesn't have a geo thermal spa in every room. The water is so hot you generally have to add cold water to make it bearable. Depends where you are and what your tolerance is but it isn't lacking in warmth, put it that way.
There is no tap to turn off the Geo water, don't know if they can't for physical reasons with pressure etc or they just don't bother. It just overflows 24/7 and no greenee seems to whine about water wasteage.
The rotoroua convention centre/ indoor stadium is totally geo powered. They have a turbine for power and of course the place is heated the same way. It's on a very active lake where you can walk around and see small steam geysers coming out of the lake shore and around. It's got a 18" fence around it but of course like all good tourists we couldn't read Kiwi english so walked around and had a good look. It was amazing.
We went to a thermal park and the gysers there were the ones that shot into the air on command and smaller ones coming out of no where. there was a lake that steamed even though the day was near 30C and was far too hot to put your hand in.
They have a few geo power generation plants around the area mainly around Taupo where the geo park we went to was. They are building more plants ATM but the Rotorua council has of course laws on tapping the go power even for homeowners. They have regulations ( read taxes) on this basically inexhaustible supply of power. The temps of the geo ranges from 40 which is warm to 140 which is well past saturated steam.
Being the type I am, I'd be looking into a mini Geo powered Turbine no worries.
One thing about the place we learned, it stinks. We were looking in a tourist guide and in a sub headline on an ad from one place it had " No Sulphur Smell". We wondered what that was about till we were about 20 Km away ans started accusing one another of ripe gaseous emissions. Of course when they hadn't subsided for 10 min, the penny dropped. You do get a bit used to it after a few hours but when you first get near the lake... Hooley dooley!
As an aside, the place really did my head in. having been self employed about 90% of my life and studied business, marketing and sales, I was surprised how quiet the place was. There was a strip of over 1KM down the main drag where it was only hotels one beside the other, both sides of the road. each one only appeard to have a few cars there. we went into town for dinner and the end;ess restaurants were the same. miles of them, hundreds of seats and about 10% occupancy and that's being generous.
We found a Pub with a nice outdoor setting and when the girl brought us our food I started chatting her up saying that I supposed the busy season, Christmas was just around the corner. She looked a bit blankly and said , no not really. I said oh, when do all the crowds come? She looked again and said we don't really get a rush at any time, it's pretty much constant. I said Oh, ok, is this the quiet time then? No, it's always like this.
I'm thinking WTF?? I said, thinking she may not know the area, Have you been living here long? She said yes, I was born here and still live at home. By now I'm thinking the nice girl must be on drugs or something.
You can't have 5000 hotel beds in a little tourist town along with endless restaurants and have them survive at 10% saturation.
I asked some more people about the rush and got the same answers, it's the same here all the time, just like this..... W T F
Don't know how that works. It's just not little owner/ operator places, there is an international Chain hotel there with a 7 storey building and that probably didn't even have 20 cars in the carpark either.
I felt sorry for the locals so we stayed a couple of nights in the smaller places but although clean, they were woefully out of date. No wonder the owners rolled out teh threadbare red carpet though and thanked us like we saved their lives. the 3rd night it was the big hotel though for some real comfort and a bit of luxury. Didn't even take much talking to get a massive upgrade with them into a suite for a middle range room price.
I got to admit, my real "Idealistic" power is Hydro. Solar is nice and practical and all that but not enough real fun involved as in no moving parts. Hydro would be great to play with in my old age.
Of course i live on the driest freaking continent in teh world so water sufficent for hydro is limited here even if we do have the worlds largest hydro scheme at one point.
I have spent many hours looking for properties that I could do a hydro setup on and there are some around although always distant from any major town let alone city. I could probably pick something up for $100K But that is a lot of money to pay for a hobby!! Not to say I wouldn't do it anyway. I am not much of a traveler but I and the Mrs could be very happy in a remote bush location with a shack built from a few shipping containers and spend some quiet time away from the rat race. I think we would still have to have a place in the rat race as well, too much quiet freaks me out so i'd have to acclimatise. :0)
Lister in the shed, panels on the roof, water spinning up some various home made turbines and hydro generators..... I could set up my own power company! :0)
Hi there, Glort
Rotorua is an odd place - you can't extrapolate the Rotorua experience out to the rest of New Zealand
It had a big tourism development a bunch of years ago when overseas tourism to NZ was basically bus-load after bus-load of Japanese tourists . . .
That model doesn't exist any more but the infrastructure still does
And tourists want a lot more these days than some hot pools and a Cultural Experience or two - and so they should
I am oversimplifying here, of course, but that's the guts of it.
New Zealand is almost completely "renewable" electricity generation - lots of wind turbines and a big "battery bank" of hydro
Electric cars would be great here if the price came down - we pay around $0.20 - $0.25 per kw/h; but almost $NZ 2.00 a litre (sort of $US 10.00 a gallon-ish) for our gas
And we are ripped-off on our back-into-the-meter solar just like everywhere else in the world . . . .
I have an off-the-grid property in development at the moment & the budget looks something like:
(1) Old 1939 6/1 CS and 5kW ST-clone - about $NZ 2000-2500 once all up and running
(2) Solar panels, inverter, batteries - around the $NZ 4500-7000 depending on spec
(3) 6kVA Honda generator in use whenever I am there at the moment - I think it was $NZ 1600?
Call it $NZ 10,000 and it is workable at that level in combination with a house with solar hot-water in summer and wetback hot-water in winter, LPG (Propane) hob in the kitchen, and a bit of a hands-on approach to managing the technology
If the average NZ power bill is something like $NZ 200 a month - that's a lot of months to pay it all back . . . .
But what isn't mentioned is the cost of getting the power to a rural site like mine - often $NZ 10K - 40K up front
Got the old Lister in the workshop now with the head off - a work in progress
Very interesting Forum you guys run here. Thanks