06-27-2008, 01:06 PM
dan - yes I am surely one of the nimby'ers, but at the same time, as a member of PGC back in the early '80s I did a lot of research.. and the correspondences I had with scientists in new zealand and california did lead me to believe that geothermal is a pretty big long shot when one wants to generate a lot of power. the footprint needed to drill enough wells.. and the rate that any one well goes bad makes the whole enterprise way out of scale for our community. there is also some very real dangers that thankfully we have not had to contend with.. yet. ground collapse, and well blowouts being a few. keep in mind when the state first proposed geothermal they wanted to ship the energy to oahu.. and that would have required a whole lot of wells. and then there is the fact that not every hole drilled hits a resource. when they drilled in the middle rift they put (I believe) five wells in and didn't hit one heat resource. even though they were right on the rift zone. I haven't any idea how they are doing on that account down in lower puna, but they cover that one up by using each dead hole to re-inject the crap they bring up from each working well. but all the wells do die off. all the 'test' wells that were originally next door to the current plant went dead a long time ago. so to have a sustainable resource they would have to consume more and more land. and we all know that isn't going to happen. and of course any industrial complex that the community becomes dependent upon that is in lava zone one.. is just nuts. those wells today are on the rift.. look at all the cinder cones and vent complexes in the area.. nuts!
the only geothermal resource that was identified when don thomas did the initial resource mapping of the whole state, that would have a chance of being in a 'fairly' stable area, was on maui. I wonder how the people over there would feel about it.