If you want to boil an egg, you can heat the water on a stove and put the egg in the hot water. Or you can take the egg to a hot spring and put the egg in the hot spring.
Not everybody has a hot spring like we once did but there are lots of them around. Or you can drill for hot water like we and all our neighbors do for cold water.
Some people think drilling is bad. Maybe they have bad experiences with dentists.
It is the same if you want to generate electricity. You can burn some fuel, preferably fossil fuels in the good ol' U.S. of A., to heat the boiler. Or you can skip the boiler and use hot water provided by Mother Earth. It doesn't have to be boiling BTW.
Where can you get this hot water from Mother Earth?
You can get it from a magic pond in Vermont where ice never forms, you can get it from an oil well in Florida, you can get it from lots of places where we don't bother looking because it isn't cool.
Some folks think that you can only get geothermal power from the Pacific "Ring of Fire." Americans aren't too good on geography.
Here is the Ring of Fire:
Vermont isn't in that Ring of Fire. Neither is Florida. Take my word for it. Iceland isn't in that Ring of Fire either. Some people say Iceland is unique. It is unique only in the way all places are unique. Kenya isn't in that Ring of Fire. Kenya is developing geothermal power aggressively. A son of a Kenyan, who will soon be president of the U.S., hasn't thought much on it because Americans don't know geothermal and many prefer dirty fossil fuels anyway.
Back to Vermont:
Meddie Perry, a senior hydrogeologist with VHB-Pioneer, has been working with the village of Bellows Falls since this summer to explore the potential of tapping into what he says is a source of geothermal energy that is beneath the bedrock of the village.
Perry's firm was paid $5,000 to find the best spots for potential wells and determine whether it makes sense to invest more money in the plan.
Perry told the trustees Tuesday that while he could not guarantee that there is enough geothermal power to run a municipal utility, he said he was certain that there was enough there to heat and cool individual buildings.
"There is an awful lot of heat energy," Perry said. "I am confident a heat source is there."
Kinda figures that though there are a new breed of physicists around here who proclaim heat isn't energy anyway. Be fascinating to learn about this new physics.
There are still mountains in West Virginia and Kentucky that haven't been topped, fish and streams that haven't yet been killed, coal that hasn't been all dug up yet, a planet that hasn't been killed. Why gamble when you can be certain?
Best, Terry