Transcript
Considering the challenge of climate change, the work that we are doing here in the Western Australian Geothermal Centre of Excellence, in short WAGCOE, is less about the last four years of research that we have been doing, but about the coming future, the next 50 years.
We have developed a concept called geothermal cities. Now, what is a geothermal city? A geothermal city consists of a city that is entirely driven by the heat beneath your feet.
How does it work? You start with an electric power plant. There you can actually turn heat from 125 degrees nowadays into electricity, so you only need to drill, say, 3 kilometres down and get hot water up and drive an electric power station.
The next step would be then use the waste heat from that power station- which normally goes up into the atmosphere and wastes water in cooling towers- you don't do this, but you use it for other machines that can be used for, for instance cooling. So, at say 80 degrees you can still use that heat to run what is called an adsorption, or absorption chiller that turns heat energy into cool energy, so you can use it for district cooling.
The next step would be, well, we need to drink. At 65 degrees we can still use the heat to run a distillation process, under partial vacuum, and then win fresh water from dirty water, or basically salt water from the sea.
After that at 40, 50 degrees you can still use the heat for your fun, for swimming pool heating, or for aquaculture so you can actually make big ponds and raise fish, farming, greenhouses need heat, they need an air conditioning system to run the plants properly.
So you can have a complete system engineering design where the city is entirely driven by heat. So that's a geothermal city.
