A news story today from the Guardian explores geothermal energy, specifically in relation to retrofitting geothermal technology at former fracking sites. But most excitingly for us in Cornwall it even highlights some the pioneering geothermal projects in the UK and the Eden Project’s geothermal project was of course discussed.

The £22m project was seen as a big gamble when it was first launched but by understanding how geothermal renewable electricity generation works and knowing the geology of Cornwall, one can start to appreciate the huge potential that geothermal renewables could offer us in the south west of the UK. 

Indeed, the potential geothermal resources available to the UK are now under both academic scrutiny and a subject of government discussion. Despite, a huge amount of optimism the same barrier to widespread, large-scale geothermal renewable electricity generation keeps coming up. The cost.

The above linked post from the UK parliament specifically references the high upfront cost of geothermal electricity projects being one the main barriers to large scale adoption. It is thus no surprise that one of the main goals of the Eden Project geothermal project was to achieve breakthroughs in the reduction of drilling costs to support and encourage the adoption of more geothermal projects in the UK.

Even on a small scale geothermal in the form of ground source hear pumps have a lot of the same problems. Estimated costs could range from £28,000 for a trench-based system or up to £49,000 if a borehole needs need to be dug. This isn’t cheap by any means but could bring your heating bill down significantly (£1400 if you are coming from new electric storage heaters). This is a poor pay-back period compared to something like solar panelling and battery storage.

Perhaps with more investment and innovation maybe we could start to bring down the costs of geothermal technology. With our fight against the climate crisis it is our opinion we will see the cost of geothermal, both domestic and large-scale, will start to drop (just as it did and continues to with solar PV). 

Fingers crossed for a geothermal revolution soon to happen. If you want to see how much the cost of solar panelling has already dropped then get in touch and find out how we can help.