15. November 2012 Helmholtz Head Office

The potential for using geothermal energy in urban areas

Production test in the hole U-53 in Iceland (Photo: Thomas Reinsch, GFZ) AGeothermie-hole U-53 in the geothermal Hellisheiði in southwest Iceland during a production test in August 2009. Photo:...

Geothermie-Bohrung im Geothermalfeld Hellisheiði in Südwest-Island während eines Produktionstests im August 2009. Foto: Reinsch, GFZ

A workshop on the future role of geothermal energy in supplying heat in Europe took place in Brussels today on the initiative of the European Commission. The European Workshop on Future Utilization of Geothermal Energy in Urban Areas addressed the use of geothermal energy in generating heat and electricity in towns and cities and included a speech by EU Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger. The event was organised by two Helmholtz Centres: the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam ‒ German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ).

“Huge amounts of energy are consumed in urban areas. In Germany alone, heating accounts for over 60 percent of energy consumption – and most of this comes from fossil fuels. The geothermal potential located deep underground could cover this demand many times over,” said Prof. Jürgen Mlynek, President of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres. “For example, fossil fuels supply over 98 percent of the heating in Berlin. Deep geothermal energy could be useful here. The Helmholtz Association has set up a wide-ranging research project on deep geothermal energy in which renowned experts from the Helmholtz Centres in Potsdam and Karlsruhe, with the support of the Helmholtz Centre in Leipzig (UFZ – Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research), are developing solutions for using geothermal resources,” Mlynek continued.

There is no doubt that geothermal energy has huge potential as a renewable resource: the 2011 IPCC report stated that the top five kilometres of Europe’s crust contain enough energy to supply the region with some 4,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity and 2,000 TWh of heating per year. This is roughly equivalent to Europe’s total annual energy consumption. As geothermal energy provides reliable base load power – that is, it does not depend on fluctuations in the weather – the power grids could be stabilised for wind and solar energy if only five percent of this potential were used. Many geothermal power plants have already been installed in Europe or are at the planning stage. They have the capacity to supply 86.1 TWh of heating and 14 TWh of electricity each year, thus saving billions of litres of heating oil. In urban areas in particular, geothermal energy could be used to convert fossil-fuelled heating into a reliable heating supply that is low in CO2 emissions. In Germany, the southern region (the Upper Rhine Plain and Upper Bavaria) is particularly suited to an intensive use of geothermal energy to produce dependable base load power, not least because the region’s long distance from the wind farms in northern Germany and the solar farms in southern Europe mean that extensive transmission routes and storage technologies are needed to use these energy sources.

The Helmholtz Association’s geothermal research is aligned with the European Energy Research Alliance’s (EERA) Joint Programme on Geothermal Energy in which 25 European research institutes from eleven countries have joined forces under the auspices of the GFZ to develop cost-effective technologies for the sustainable use and the expansion of geothermal energy. In the short term, the aim is to increase the amount of electricity generated by conventional geothermal power plants to between two and ten gigawatts. Although volcanic regions such as Iceland are particularly suited to such generation, so-called enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) can also be used in areas with a low level of thermal energy. The KIT and GFZ are conducting research with international partners on these systems with the aim of supplementing the heating or the electricity and heating base load supply in urban areas irrespective of their geographical location. This would lead to a long-term reduction of fossil fuel consumption in urban areas.