EL CENTRO — The Imperial Irrigation District board voted unanimously on amendments that finalized a 30-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with GeoGenCo, LLC for its next generation 18.4 megawatt (MW) project at the Tuesday, Sept. 6 regular meeting.
The project is identified as True Geothermal because current geothermal projects require substantial amounts of water or steam as part of their power generation process. They are therefore more appropriately known as hydro-geothermal since water is a mandatory part of the geothermal process (either in the form of brine or steam) for both the extraction of heat and for the disposal of the residual brine, according to the GeoGenCo website.
Rather than extracting the geothermal fluids, a high-performance heat exchanger is inserted into an existing (but non-performing) geothermal well where only heat is extracted from the geothermal formation, not from water, brine or steam. While a permit application for approximately six acre-feet of water has been filed, about one third of this water will be utilized for dust control and the other two thirds reserved for emergency fire-fighting purposes. Zero water will be utilized for the power generation process, according to the company.
GeoGenCo said a geothermal plant can require an average of 800 to 1,000 acre-feet of water per megawatt per year. A 50 MW geothermal power plant could therefore require between 40,000 and 50,000 acre-feet of water per year.
IID Board President Jim Hanks said the Valley has 100 geothermal wells drilled, some deemed not hot enough or with insufficient brine to create steam to turn the turbines. He said this new technology could use these discarded wells to produce power exponentially increasing the base level of energy to sell. Geothermal power is considered base level whereas solar and wind are labeled intermittent as their power is dependent on wind and sunshine.
Because it is baseload it will help to balance the grid and allow additional intermittent renewable energy projects to be added to the grid.
“This project is potentially a very profitable project for IID,” said Hanks. “The amount of energy that we have could that could be serviced by this type of technology is almost unlimited. This new technology uses no water, it can be operated by our staff and produce baseload energy 24/7 with no fossil fuel. It has great potential.”
While hydro geothermal power has the smallest land use footprint of any renewable power (an average of 4.5 Acres/MW or less than 10% of solar power), True Geothermal has less than half the footprint of hydro geothermal facilities.
GeoGenCo's CEO was at the meeting and spoke after the vote thanking the board for passing the last amendments of the PPA. “This was a long time coming. Passing this was crucial for our financing, which should take 6-8 weeks. We greatly appreciate the work of the IID. We look forward to working with IID on numerous future projects.”
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