Can Undersea Volcanoes Power Cities? A Seattle Startup Just Took the First Step
Dips Into Strategic Oil Reserve Again Amid Supply Disruptions Haley Zaremba is an energy journalist and researcher with more than a decade of professional experience covering global energy systems, land and natural resources, and… A geothermal startup aiming to source energy directly from undersea volcanoes just hit a major milestone that could bring round-the-clock clean energy to cities on the northwest coast of the United States and serve as a critical proof of concept for other regions, with particular relevance for the other 14 countries situated along the Pacific Ring of Fire.
Seattle-based energy startup Endurance Energy just announced that it successfully created net-positive energy from its underwater geothermal plant in a world first.
The company successfully demonstrated a full operations cycle from drilling to electricity generation in a major breakthrough for next-gen clean energy tech.
Although the demonstration created less than 10 seconds of positive energy production, the implications of those ten seconds are hard to overstate.
27, we put a power plant on an active underwater volcano and made power,” said Andrew Redd, founder and CEO of Endurance Energy.
“This historic milestone is also our first end-to-end test.
We now know, firsthand, what works at depth, what needs to be improved, and how to build the next system for sustained commercial generation.” Not only does the brief achievement serve as a critical proof of concept for the technology, the project also “showed that operators in Seattle could control the system from an offshore location, remotely starting and stopping the equipment, monitoring temperatures and pressures, and collecting data without being underwater,” according to a recentreportfrom Interesting Engineering.
Putting a geothermal plant on the seafloor presents some key benefits as compared to traditional models, but also yields critical trade-offs.
The cool water of the seafloor acts as a natural cooling system, and the pressure of the water acts as a natural pressurizer that allows for the plants to be designed compactly, according to Redd.
The company’s next milestone, building a larger 2-megawatt commercial generator in the Pacific island nation of Tonga, will be a test of these more productive, but still compact, generator systems.
“The 2 MW commercial generators will be about the size of a shipping container, and we are deploying up to six of these generators [to] offshore Tonga,” Redd told Ars Technica.
“The physical footprint of this project will be relatively small.” However, building a geothermal plant underwater presents extra challenges that could incur prohibitively high upfront costs as compared to on-land models.
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