Another way forward: geothermal electricity

The potential of Antillean islands with active volcanoes to get most or even all of their energy as electricity generated by geothermal steam has been dreamt about for decades and summarised recently in a PowerPoint presentation placed on the internet by Erouscilla Joseph, SRU, in March 2008. Here are the opening and Montserrat pages of the presentation: 

See details of this UN conference in Bridgetown, Barbados at: http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/sids/2008_roundtable/presentations.htm	Dr Joseph's academic and professional details are at: http://www.uwiseismic.com/StaffProfile.aspx?id=4	Krafla, an active geothermal area in northern Iceland

The main effect of the ongoing eruption is to limit (to say the least!) the areas in the south of Montserrat where geophysical exploration for geothermal hot water and steam can be undertaken. Fortunately, St George’s Hill shelters some of the western region (just north of Plymouth) from the PFs, surges and lahars raining down from the summit dome, and this is where exploration has focused recently. At the time of writing in May 2011, the geophysics team has located likely areas for exploratory drilling and the next stage of evaluation is funded by the UK Government. Of course there can be no guarantee that such drilling will locate suitable steam reservoirs but the recent locating of commercial quantities of such steam on Nevis is encouraging.

Plymouth is destroyed to the right but St George's Hill has kept both PFs and lahars away from the sheltered zone to the left (the volcano is under fume and ash clouds -- mid-February 2010). Note small eruption behind St George's!	I understand that one possible area of the geothermal zone is around the centre right of this view, beside the coast. Others are between Garibaldi and St George's Hills.	Helicopter view across most of the inland parts of the potential geothermal zone (see maps below).

Most of the roads in the geothermal area are still in excellent condition.	Likewise the power supply lines (and both flowers and birds!)	Buildings remain in excellent condition. They only require banked boulders on the sides exposed to potential pyroclastic surges and strong surge-proof doors on their lee sides.

From steam to electricity

There may well be many viewers of this page who, like my grandma long ago, used electricity but had absolutely no knowledge of, or interest in, how the stuff was generated. If so this Youtube link is for YOU!

Obviously Montserrat residents cannot spend their entire time rotating coils of wire in magnetic fields. In the days of the British Empire in India, countless “punkawallas” operated room-cooling systems comprising fans and lengths of string. Doubtless some of the wives of the Irish slavemasters on Montserrat used their free labour in the same sorts of ways but maybe this is no longer the ideal way to operate on the island! A punkawalla was never going to power transport but electricity most certainly can do so (see below).

Another alternative for “Green” electricity generation on Montserrat would be to use the sunlight to generate steam by boiling water. If you happen to be quite well to do and live somewhere high and semi-arid in California, you can use a set of parabolic solar reflectors (known in the past as mirrors!) to generate steam on a household scale by boiling water and then use the steam to run your generator.

But this still cannot help with running the family SUV.

Electricity generation on Montserrat at present

At present Monlec generates electricity with generators that use diesel fuel to power them. Gasoline powers the vehicles that buzz around all over the place. The fuels are imported from producers who do things like drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, creating immense spillage contamination problems over vast areas and killing the local wildlife wholesale.

This the price paid elsewhere for Montserrat’s addiction to hydrocarbon-fuelled power.

Electricity generated by giant windmills sounds like a good “green” alternative until you remember the once-a-generation hurricanes and what they can do to the island. Would it be worth investing in windmill generators, only to see them flattened? Sturges gave up on lime plantations for this reason, amongst others. Also they would possibly not be the ideal structures to site all over this “paradise isle” as it struggles to attract more tourists to its beautiful scenery.  Nevertheless, there's a long uninhabited stretch of the windy eastern coast that would provide ideal wind turbine sites and cry out for such a development. Also extraordinary is the continuing survival of an older smallish wind generator on St George's Hill.

Using ethanol from sugar cane to fuel both the new generator and vehicles (as in Brazil – from my personal experience) would be nice but also need far more land than exists on the island.

Hydroelectricity works fine in lucky Dominica, because is has the ideal combination of lakes, rivers and mountains. Although Runaway Ghaut on Montserrat is a lovely place (when the ash is not around), it does not really qualify as a hydroelectric water resource!

Even the flammable rubbish produced on Montserrat has potential to be burned, rather than dumped, and hence to generate its share of the heat needed to produce steam, instead of just creating a well-stocked larder for donkeys.

All that Montserrat would require to maintain present electricity supplies would be a steam-powered generator or generators, like those on Dominica. Then the residents could stop adding to world pollution (via their oil addiction) and enjoy the bounty that comes to any place, like Iceland,  lucky enough to have an erupting volcano as its neighbour.

So how has Montserrat and its residents responded to this opportunity to reach green self-sufficiency in electricity – with all the energy of a constipated paraplegic snail! Come back Roman emperors; all is forgiven (at least things are said to have worked OK in their empire)! Take a look at the Reporter files (on their OLD pre-July-2010 website; ask the Editor how to access) if you doubt me. Perhaps the most depressing aspect of this endless debate has been the trickle of silly anti-geothermal anonymous blogs on the Reporter website.

For instance, those who moo about the prospect of ugly transmission cables across the Belham Valley and along the western coast seem unaware that only a total nitwit would plan to hang transmission cables above a valley likely to be swept at little or no notice by huge pyroclastic flows and their accompanying devastating surges. Take a look at Trants on 11 February 2010 before proposing such nonsense. What do you think underwater electricity cables are for? Of course any cable crossing offshore from Belham will need to be far enough out to sea to avoid damage from PF and lahar rubble. I've discussed this matter in some detail with a senior UK power transmission installation engineer from a major company in this field and he can see no problems at all with such an undersea cable transmission project. His company does this sort of thing worldwide all the time and would be one of many bidding for such a juicy contract.

Likewise the folk (including GoM and DFID?) who fret that the volcano might mess up the power station with pyroclastic fall/flow/surge products seem unaware of such matters as the geothermal power stations on Iceland, at least one close to Eyjafjallajokull, that have been unaffected by mighty showers of ash recently. The specific problems associated with pyroclastic flows and surges have been dissected in detail above. If decision-makers are still scared of the volcano, remember the huge underground hydroelectric power stations at Ben Cruachan and Dinorwic in the UK. Like the eight 29-mile-long cross-Channel power lines beneath the sea separating England from France that bring about 5 percent of British electricity from its nuclear-energy-rich neighbour, power transmission by submarine cables is routine worldwide.

Everyone on all the Antillean islands with geothermal power potential has dreamt for years about the prosperity for their patch to be brought by selling surplus electricity to another island without such plentiful power. Montserrat currently uses about 2MW of electricity and has been thinking in terms of a geothermal plant producing 5 MW. For a contrasting example, a modern Iceland plant produces about 60MW of electricity which could also provide Antigua (about 25 miles of sea distant from Montserrat) with around a fiftieth of its current electricity needs. Why not build one or more Krafla-sized generation plants on Montserrat, run a cable to Antigua and make a fat profit from selling electricity there at whatever price guarantees willing buyers? If the Antiguans are reluctant to buy Montserratian electricity, offer it free for a few months and see them change their minds! By the way, I've talked through this matter of a sub-sea cable to Antigua with a senior project manager concerned with electricity transport across SW England from the nuclear power stations there. He says that his company installs similar sub-sea cables routinely and that crossing the deep trench between the islands should be no insuperable technical problem . The UK Government is at present considering whether or not to make this section of our National Grid sub-sea.

Financial stuff

Professional pessimists have blogged to the Reporter website that finance will be an impossible hurdle for the Montserrat proposals to cross. This is TOTAL RUBBISH! At the moment (May 2011) the relevant UK funding agency (DFID) has already funded the initial geothermal exploration and subsequently allocated the funding for final evaluation of all three alternative ways to provide electricity for Montserrat: wind, geothermal and of course, a new back-up diesel generator.

Why confine the “greening” of Montserrat to geothermal power?

All the focus so far on geothermal electricity for Montserrat seems to me to have suffered from the huge deficiency of simply not being sufficiently imaginative or radical. Why continue with “business as usual” when you can easily generate ample low-cost power to satisfy your needs about 30 times over? Montserrat is a tiny island with only a few miles of roads and a global 20 MPH speed limit. It’s little bigger than a monster golf-course complex and should use the same means to transport people who cannot or will not walk, namely golf buggies. These can be less fancy than the luxury model shown here. But, make no mistake, these things are now routinely used by everyone for personal transport on small islands elsewhere, such as the Scillies (see last page). None of these places has any excuse in the present day for using gasoline powered vehicles for private transport. Special pricing for electricity to refuel battery-driven vehicles could make a Montserrat ban on hydrocarbon-fuelled vehicles financially painless.

Montserrat also uses a handful of diesel-powered trucks, bulldozers etc. Doubtless the research divisions of one or more major vehicle manufacturers would jump at the chance to site a facility on an all-electric mountainous tropical island for developing and testing electric trucks and 4x4s. Here's the high-tech, future-oriented foreign investment that Montserrat yearns and, if those with the power and responsibility get a move on, the island may beat the likes of Dominica and Nevis to such obvious goals. Such a facility could also work on developing a fancy luxury official vehicle for the Governor, unless of course he/she could be tempted to drive around in a customised version of the electric car launched last year by Miles EV. Surely even government folk, the police and the rich would find one of these fine for such a small place? I appreciate the the Governor's team might prefer UK-made vehicle, like the Nissan Leaf. The local teenage lads who adore charging around on their noisy motorbikes could emigrate to Antigua or elsewhere. Then everyone on this amazing island could wake up and hear the birdsong again -- whenever the volcano is not actually exploding! It might also become a mecca for ecotourists, which would be good.

To my horror, the current (August 2010) Montserrat Prime Minister, Reuben Meade, failed even to mention geothermal energy when he presented the 2010-11 budget in March. Has a history of UK dependency, plus the eruption, knocked every trace of initiative and foresight out of the island's government.  Since then the UK has also offered funding and a new UK Governor, Adrian Davis, is in post. His credentials for the job at this time are ideal because he trained as an economist and has headed the environmental policy section of DFID in the past. His previous post was for 7 years in China and so he will appreciate the scale of Chinese investment in Dominica and other Caribbean islands and possibly consider Chinese funding to supplement any from the UK.  His Excellency has told me that the drive towards geothermal energy is something that also tops his agenda, so maybe things will begin to move at last.

Since then, in early April 2011, the MVO organised an excellent conference that covered all aspects of the volcano, including the prospects of geothermal energy. Perhaps the most important thing for geothermal enthusiasts was the agreement of all senior SAC members that it will be safe to drill for steam in the exclusion zone SE of Garibaldi Hill. The risk issue is a Health-and-Safety one for the drilling companies. Subsequently, Governor Davis has told me that the drilling of the first production trial well, funded by the British FCO/DFID, is imminent. The future plans for this project are so startling that I'll keep them to Adrian Davis and myself for a while! Meanwhile, here are a few photos from the conference:

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