Geothermal energy, efficiency and development

While geothermal energy production in Italy is reaching new unprecedented results, Enel Green Power is still investing and studying new solutions, following a development plan at a global level.

Enel Green Power keeps on studying new ways to generate electricity from renewable sources, especially in the geothermal sector.

IN 2011 electricity production from geothermal sources met 26 percent of the energy needs of the region of Tuscany.

As the CEO of Enel Green Power Francesco Starace recently explained in an interview, “at Larderello (Tuscany), EGP manages one of the largest complexes in the world: 35 plants with 720 net MW, producing over 5 billion kWh per year, the average annual consumption of about 2 million households. Furthermore, it provides heat to more than 8,700 residential and business customers and to about 25 hectares of greenhouses.”

 

While it’s engaged in the Italian scenario, Enel Green Power is committed to strengthen its undisputable leadership abroad in the field of geothermal energy by developing new initiatives. Indeed, its commitment in Tuscany is part of a development plan at an international level: the Group is planning on allocating – by 2016 – 16% of 6.1 billion euros for the development of geothermal, in which EGP is engaged in North America, in Turkey and in Latin America.

EGP’s leadership is technological, as well as historic and geographic. Thanks to its ability to excellently control and manage all the phases of each project, EGP can achieve a 95% plant efficiency, compared with a world average of about 70%. Furthermore, Starace explains that “in the development of binary plants to harness resources at low-medium temperature, a prototype of supercritical binary reactor has been planned, presently tested at Enel’s experimental area in Livorno jointly with the Polytechnic of and the MIT in Boston, and developed by Turboden, an Italian company that is a leader in machinery construction”.

This technology will allow the harnessing of geothermal resources to be far more widespread than it is at present.

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