Geothermal Power Plants, 3rd Edition

Foreword to the Third Edition

The third publication and expanded edition of Ron DiPippo’s Geothermal Power Plants is timely considering the renewed interest in geothermal energy development across the globe.

The potential of geothermal heat energy is enormous; it’s estimated that, over the course of a year, the equivalent of more than 100 million GWh of heat energy is conducted from the Earth’s interior to the surface. But geothermal energy tends to be relatively diffuse, a phenomenon making it difficult to tap. The Earth itself concentrates geothermal heat in certain regions – typically, regions associated with the boundaries of tectonic plates in the planet’s crust – and this makes geothermal energy useful as a heat source for direct use or ...