Sorry, no, you can’t have geothermal - it’s illegal, see?
Someone really should have told the British Geological Survey this:
Cornwall should be made into an industrial hub to fuel net zero, government scientists have urged Ed Miliband.
Britain’s favourite holiday county and the broader South West of England have been deemed an energy “super-region”, meaning its geology is suited to a raft of new energy-based industries.
The hot volcanic rocks lying below parts of Cornwall and Devon make them a top prospect for geothermal energy, according to the British Geological Survey (BGS), which advises the Government on the country’s earth science.
Worth checking whether idiots have made your plan illegal before announcing your plan. Just as a bit of advice.
Because geothermal power is, in reality, illegal in Britain.
You see, we once allowed the likes of Friends of the Earth (and, yes, to a large extent it was them) to determine energy policy. As they’re simply dead against anyone using dead animals to keep warm they wanted to make sure that fracking couldn’t happen. So, the wizzard wheeze of insisting that fracking could only be done as long as it caused earthquakes no more powerful than 0.5 on the usual scale. This is about the cat jumping from the bookcase level of disturbance, certainly less than a lorry going by. But, what a wheeze, eh? Chortle, chortle, that really got the fossil fuel fanatics, eh?
Except:
The Eden Project near St Austell already exploits the region’s natural advantages, keeping visitors warm using heat extracted from rocks 3.3-miles beneath its surface.
People living in a Cornish town were left shaken after geothermal testing at the Eden Project caused an earthquake. Tremors were felt near the project's site in St Austell around 9.20pm on Wednesday 9 March. No major damage has been reported but the 1.6 magnitude quake did cause homes to shake up to three miles away.
Geothermal causes quakes ten times larger than are allowed (yes, it’s a logarithmic scale). So, obviously, geothermal cannot be allowed. They try, of course:
Gus Grand from Eden Geothermal said workers were injecting water into the ground to test its permeability which triggered the tremor.
She said: "We're not drilling and we haven't been drilling since mid-November, we are testing at the moment which means we are injecting water into the ground to see how permeable it is and this is associated with tiny seismic activity.
"We've been doing it since January and we've had a lot of very small events which is great because it shows us where the permeability is in the rock so in the future we can generate electricity from it."
Ten times the legal limit is tiny. Well, it is if it’s not about dead animals that is.
So, if we’re to allow that general exploitation of geothermal - which we think is a damn good idea by the way - then we’ve got to lift that absurd earthquake limit then, don’t we? Which would also mean allowing fracking - which, by the way, we also think is a damn good idea. At the very least we need to allow it to find out whether it actually works or not. For only then can we work out whether we’d actually like to be warm and toasty even if slightly shaken rather than unstirred and freezing.
But that’s not what’s going to happen, is it? Quite obviously not for this is all politics. The place casuistry goes to die.
Aren’t we the lucky ones.
Tim Worstall