Meet Geothermal power, Geo for short.
He’s not really at home in Scotland.
He’s an extreme kind of guy.
He likes a bit of danger.
He’s happiest in places with earthquakes and volcanos – where tectonic plates meet.
Tectonic plates are giant slabs of solid rock that make up the Earth’s crust.
The plates sit on top of boiling hot magma (melted rocks to you and me), called the Earth’s mantle.
The plates sort of float about on the magma, moving to and fro, sliding into each other and sometimes causing natural disasters on the surface.
But it’s not all bad, because the gaps in between the plates, called fault lines, sometimes let a wee bit of magma squeeze through.
And that magma heats up natural underground reservoirs, or big pools of water.
You know when you see a kettle boiling, with all the steam coming out the top? Well, they’re like that. Definitely keep your hands off!
And this is where Geo comes back in: hi Geo. Yes, yes you are radical.
Geo’s excited because this is basically hot water – for free!
And hot water is great for making electricity.
Geothermal power plants draw steam from the reservoirs to the surface.
The kinetic energy from the steam turns the turbines and generators turn this energy into electricity. The steam cools and becomes water again.
Then it’s piped back underground to the reservoir where it will heat up and be used again.
This is great news for countries like Iceland, New Zealand or Indonesia, because they’re on the fault lines of tectonic plates, so their power plants provide a constant, renewable and reliable source of electricity.
Countries like Scotland can’t build Geothermal power plants because they’re not on fault lines.
But Geo can help us out in Scotland just a wee bit with ground source heat pumps.
Ground source heat pumps push fluid through a loop of pipes underground.
Heat from the ground warms the fluid which flows up into your house, and through a heat exchanger where it heats up household water.
Sorry Geo. I know hot washing-up water isn’t very extreme.
But it is very useful!
